If you’ve entered a local home for a Christmas party, you’ve probably encountered Celia Meadors’ work. She’s a university-trained portrait artist who, over the years, discovered that people really, really like her portraits of a certain “right jolly old elf”—complete with the ruddy cheeks, white beard, and twinkling eyes that define the classic Santa Claus.
“I work in all kinds of mediums—pastel, pen-and-ink, watercolor, whatever appeals to me. I still do a lot of commission work. But this seems to be the niche that I’ve fallen into,” she says.
Meadors painted her first Santa on a 4- by 6-foot drop cloth for the 1990 Christmas Roundup gala. “It went for auction at the gala for more than I’d sold anything at that point,” she explains. And unlike portraits of families or children, she didn’t have to please parents, aunts or uncles. She only needed to create a recognizable St. Nick. “Everybody loves Santa Claus,” she says.
She has painted more than 100 oil portraits of Santa over the years, mostly selling prints, though collectors have bought a few of her originals. These days, she creates as many as three new images each year. “I like old faces. I like to do wrinkles,” she says. To force her oil paint to drip like watercolor, she combines it with a painting medium to make the paint more fluid—but still controllable. “The process itself is exciting to me. When I start a picture, I start with a lot of medium and paint, and I let it drip until it comes to a certain stage. Then I start extracting the planes of the face. It’s always fun to see it come together,” Meadors says.
For this issue, she shared with Brick & Elm a few of her favorite Santa Claus portraits.
