The Illustrated Carol Project

This series of four paintings draws on traditional Ukrainian holiday music, as represented by Christmas carols, or koliadky, and New Year's songs, or shchedrivky. The vivid, descriptive texts are a window onto the Slavic past: richly layered tapestries in which Christian concepts nestle comfortably among earlier pagan symbols and surviving traces of pre-Christian traditions.

The Illustrated Carol Project was produced in cooperation with the Ukrainian History and Education Center. In 2021, UHEC selected these four paintings as their thank you gift for Giving Tuesday, and their donors received a set of holiday cards featuring these paintings. In addition to the paintings themselves, I supplied context in the form of a website: the more I looked into the carols' meanings and historical contexts, the more the project engaged the scholar in me, and the more invested I became in sharing not only the images, but also the deeply rooted traditions these carols represent.