Laurens County Advertiser - August 29, 2009
N.C. Santa is model for Laurens Artist
Article and photography Judith Brown - Staff Writer
With "Peace on Earth" strewn across the skies, Laurens artist Linda Cancel's fifth painting in her Christmas series awaits transport to her art printing company to get ready for the Christmas season. In addition to hand-delivering her painting last week, "Cliff Kdngle" Snider has been her Santa model for the paintings, all geared toward keeping the spiritual significance in the holiday. The quift at his feet in the painting was made by his grandmother and was recently found and made into a cloak to add to his Santa costumes. Snider can be found online at www.CliffKringle.com, and Cancel's paintings can be seen on www.theartistindex.com/LindaHyaftCancel. |
It was the first Christmas after the country was at war with Iraq, when "Cliff Kingle" Snider showed up for the parade held each year especially for Santas in Branson, Mo. He was wearing yet another of his cus tom made Santa suits. Although the theme that year was the "Red Santa Parade" Snider was wearing his brand new suit he had made after the 9/11 attacks: a coat of white stars on blue, and pants of red and white stripes. In other words, an American Flag plush Santa suit. He caused a bit of an uproar.
"Didn't you know this was an all red parade?... the organizer asked brusquely.
Assuring him that, yes, he had gotten the memo, but had ignored the rules, Snider was literally sent to the back of the parade line.
"On the way to the back of the line, a friend of mine handed me an American flag," Snider said. " As I came around the main part of the parade route, I'm back there in my American Flag suit and waving the flag, and everybody went crazy cheering.
"The next year, they asked me to please wear the flag suit, and they put me in the front of the parade."
Some may have considered Snider to be a bit opportunistic by designing such a suit, but the idea stemmed from a cartoon penned in 1863 by Thomas Nast, credited as being the originator of the modern day image of the American Santa. The most famous cartoonist of the day and working on a regular basis for Harper's Weekly, Nast was asked by President Lincoln if he could draw a Christmas related cartoon to cheer up the Northern troops. That Flag bedecked Santa sifting among the soldiers was the answer, and it served as inspiration these many years later for Snider.
But Snider is known for much more than bucking the system at parades. He's had write-ups in Guidepost magazine and other publications and been on various television shows. But among friends of Laurens artist Linda Hyatt Cancel, he's the Santa Muse of sorts for her Christmas series, the last of which she just completed a week or so ago. In order to have this newest oil painting copied in time for the Christmas season, Snider was in town last week picking up the fifth painting in her series, which started with "The Gift."
Cancel had sent one of her large oil paintings years ago to be copied at the art printing company in High Point , N.C., where Snider was a printer. After seeing her work, he commissioned her to do a portrait of him as Santa. They decided on a setup for a picture that ended up as "The Gift," which shows Santa handling the pieces of a manger scene. It's representing the first and greatest gift of Christmas, Cancel said, the Christ Child.
THE GIFT - In Linda Cancel's first painting of Cliff, she depicted Santa creating a manger scene. Entitled "The Gift," she said it represents that the most important gift of Christmas is the Christ Child. |
"It's been a very satisfying relationship, because we're on the same page," she said. "We're both wanting to represent not just Santa and the joy he brings, but also the spiritual aspect of Christmas."
Between working on other oil paintings for her Spartanburg gallery, Cancel and Snider have teamed up on paintings every couple of years. "And now it's the 10 year anniversary of the start of all of this," Cancel said.
It's fitting, really, that the two have worked so hard on a series related to Christmas. For Snider, the Christmas of his 15th year was wracked with grief over the loss of his father in a terrible automobile accident, which also killed an uncle and two young Marine cousins.
THE LAMB - Set in a landscape near the Joe Adair Center, in the second painting of Linda Hyatt Cancel's Christmas series, Santa Cliff Snider posed as a shepherd holding a lamb. It's important to both model and painter to represent the spiritual significance of the Christmas season in their works. |
"I was one very unhappy young man that Christmas," Snider said. Because he was "the fat kid in youth group," he said he was asked to play the Santa role when the young people from his church put on a Christmas party for children at a nearby mission.
That experience of seeing the happiness brought to children "from giving, without expecting anything in return," he said, was a pivotal point for Snider.
Some years later, Cancel herself would face her own Christmas challenges, when her younger sister, who was born on Christmas Eve, would end up dying at the age of 4 from astrosarcoma.
The work on the Christmas series has helped redeem those losses for both of them. In addition to that first painting of "The Gift," other paintings include "The Lamb," with Snider as a Father Christmas-type character holding a lamb; "The Light," with Santa in a fur-trimmed cloak with a candle; and "The Journey," more the European look of a St. Nick figure, tending sheep, from a picture originally made of Snider in the late afternoon light near the Enoree River.
SANTA IN OUR MIDST - The original photograph taken by Sue Ellen Holmes and used for this painting, "The Journey," brought Cliff Snider to the banks of the Enoree River. Artist Linda Cancel said of the experience: "it was about 4 in the afternoon, and the light was streaming in from the side when we took the picture. it was perfect." |
This last painting completed, with the stars spelling out "Peace on Earth" across the skies, will soon be ready in prints and giclées and will debut at the annual Christmas season Art Walk in Spartanburg on Nov. 19, were Cancel will represent her work, and Snider will again be Santa. Cancel has a tentative time to display them locally in December as well.
"Art and painting have sustained me through all the difficulties of my life," Cancel said. "I've made lifelong friends through my art, and Santa Cliff is one of them."