Mother's Day- Artist as Mom

(In a nod to Mother's Day, this is a repost of a previous writing. To bring you up to date, my daughter is now going to be 23 in a couple of weeks and preparing to go off to Thailand with her boyfriend for a summer of teaching English and adventure. I'm so proud of her and her fearless spirit and miss her terribly at the same time....)


My life is never seperated from my work and I have created a plethora of paintings around mothering as I journey along in one of the greatest adventures of my life.  I thought I would continue with this subject in this month when mothers are celebrated. 

Most of my paintings come from a very personal place. Even some of my cow paintings tell stories about what's going on in my life, such as in "Eat Your Broccoli" which depicts a momma cow and her  calf in a surreal field of raining broccoli. (A nod to Magritte) This painting was inspired by my Kayla who wouldn't eat broccoli as a little girl.

Before I even knew I was pregnant, I painted "My neighborhood", which depicts myself, my husband (in between the two houses) and our neighbors on their respective porches. There I am talking on the porch, very preggers, while my husband looks on.

 When I was actually pregnant, I painted this one, "Pregnant Artist." I have to laugh when I recall my pre-teen girl begging me to take it off the wall so her friends wouldn't see it. So much for being sophistcated about a little artistic nudity even though I tried to not actually show much :0) Note the Van Gogh calendar in the background and the rooster in the window. Van Gogh is my favorite and the rooster is symbolic of my husband whose last name in German means "rooster".

Sometimes I run into women who tell me that they were artists until their kids were born and then they stopped. I would just as much have stopped breathing. I don't know how they could do that, maybe they were less driven than me, but I never stopped. It helped that she was such a good, easy baby. I used to get up around 4:30 in the morning before she woke so I could paint a little, or sometimes she would sit and watch me in her little bouncy chair. At 19 months, she had her own plastic easel, paint and tam. She too created very colorful works, though she was an abstract expressionist at that time :0)..

As wonderful a baby as she was, just the shock of becoming parents can be overwhelming. The shift that takes place in your life from self centered to other-centered, and the responsibility of it all is all encompassing. I have depicted these feelings in the painting "New Baby", where the beautiful little diapered one is a giant in the space, overtaking the picture and the lives of the Mommy whom she holds in the palm of her hand and her Daddy by a string.

Having a child also was bringing up a lot of stuff for me as she grew. It was like she was holding up a mirror that reflected my life, causing me to worry and wonder about if I could make her life bettter than my upbringing had been. In this painting "Toddler" she is a hybrid of herself and me. She stands, again overwhelming the picture, but she is standing off the curb in a street between two houses, representative of the New Jersey street where I grew up. (Boy, did I have fun painting that bunny)

I painted her many more times as she has grown up, less as she approached her pre- teen and teen years when I could barely get her to be near me or smile, until this one (Flying through Life) which I painted last year, when she was leaving to go to college. It was so hard to let her go and I couldn't believe that that she was leaving already.

She and I are depicted flying through the air in our matching Mommy-Daughter dresses that I had made, through a world of things that I had taught her about or that we had discovered together.

 As I write this I am tearing up again......I know there are plenty more paintings to paint and the journey with her is not over. I just miss my baby.

Pixie Dust

Sadly, that is a cigarette:0(

I have the cutest pixie of a daughter in the world. She's 18 and has her own most adorable style of dress that I guess could be best described as if you took a punk rocker and ran her into a wall of color and then had a mind meld with a hippy and then sent her to live in some bohemian tribe, she would fit right in. Sounds wild and crazy, but she wears the outfits that she puts together with such style that women have stopped her on the street over the years (she started this as a tween) to admire and compliment her. I so love this about her. When I was young I too had my own style of 80's hip, but my girl has it all over me. I never sported fairy wings as she has been know to do either :0). She has always been her own person, eeking mega brains and personality and an off the wall sense of humor. She is not only intellectually brilliant, but is a very talented musician and writer and not surprisingly, an artist. She had  always amazed and delighted me when she was little with her bright, detailed drawings brimming with joy and the observations of a busy young mind.

I suppose perhaps the museum visits and the bed time stories of Frida Kahlo, Mary Cassatt, Degas, and one of our favorites "When Pigasso Met Mootisse" might have had something to do with her love of art.
Or maybe it was "Please Don't Eat The Pictures" (Sesame Street at the Met) that we watched over and over together. Maybe her Dad and I had something to do with it, he also being a musician. She has always had a lot going on in her mind and emotions and being a very strong willed and independent only child, can be difficult to parent at times. We are also a lot alike in many ways, and at times, the mother -daughter relationship has been painful for both of us as she struggles to break away and become her own person and I struggle with letting her go. 



When she was little I looked forward to the time when I thought she and I would spend time making art together, maybe somewhere between 12-17. Little did I know that her fiercely independent teenage personality would want nothing to do with me in that realm. I guess I shouldn't have been surprised. From the time she was small she always wanted to find things out for herself and thought she should know everything, which is why I let the desire to home school her pass. 

First Place HS ArtShow Painting

I had never "taught" her art. I purposely never sat her down and said, "this is how you do this." If she asked, I shared, but I never wanted to impose my vision or style on her.  I never wanted anyone to look at her work (if she pursued art) and say, you're good just because of your Mom. In that, I was successful, as she is such a wonderfully talented artist with a personal style and visual narrative that surpasses her youth.


To my delight, something wonderful happened this week. The time I have been waiting for came. She asked me to teach her pottery! She asked to come to the studio! She was letting me in! We can now learn and share in each others creative processes. I want to sing, I want to shout! It means so much to me to have this opportunity to share and bond with my daughter over the processes of art that have saved me.

What a delight it is to see her beautiful designs in clay coming out of her so easily.I love looking at her in her funky cloths and exploding with the creativity and specialness that is my daughter. Everyone in the studio comes over to admire her work and compliment her. I have always been proud of her for so many reasons, but this is a special kind of proud, and I am feeling an excitement about our new budding artistic relationship and us sharing where each of our artistic journeys might take us together. :0)

In the Clay Studio

Ceramic Incense Burners