Description

The Story Behind This One

Every December the internet fills up with the same safe Christmas art, snow, robins, a cottage with warm windows. This is not that, and thank god for it. Joyce Lee has painted a woman as the Christmas tree itself, long deep green hair falling like branches, strung with fairy lights and loaded with baubles, bows, bells, a pinecone collar, even a little silver reindeer clip. And climbing up the middle of it all is a tiny Santa, reaching up on his toes to hang one last red bell, with a string of old fashioned coloured bulbs slung across below him.

The joke lands because the craft is completely serious. Each ornament is painted like a portrait, the glass ones actually look like glass, the lights actually seem to glow, and the whole thing sparkles the way a real tree does when the room lights are off. It is cheeky, the title tells you that much, but it is the kind of cheeky that makes people grin from across the room, not look away. The original painting sold almost immediately when she released it, which tells you everything.