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.

On being Irish and an artist.

Think of a famous Irish painter or sculptor. Is it hard? That's because when we think of famous Irish people and their talents, the names that come up are people whose talents tend to lean more to the gift of word or song. Writers and poets like, James Joyce, Bram Stoker, Frank McCourt, Oscar Wild, Maeve Binchy. Musicians like Sinead O'Connor, Van Morrison,  Bono and Enya to name a few.

The Irish also tend to make their mark in acting. It's not to hard to think of any number of Irish actors- Michael Fassbender, Pierce Brosnan, Colin Farrell,  and Peter O'Toole. The list goes on. Unlike the Italians or French or Spanish, it's rather difficult to conjure up the names of famous Irish visual artists like painters or sculptors. Certainly there are a few in history like John Butler Yates (I'd never heard of him, I  looked it up)

Not to say that there are no great Irish artists. I'm sure there are many working today.  But those names are not on the tips of our tongues like Picasso and Michelangelo and Monet etc. It kind of makes you wonder why the history of visual arts tends to center in the European continent while in Ireland, the concentration of artistic expression is in writing and poetry and play writing and acting and song.

Perhaps it is in part because of the poverty that the Irish suffered. I suppose that if you have no money for food, you definitely have no money available for art supplies. But you do have your words and you do have good stories to tell and you have thoughts to be expressed and those don't cost anything.

The Irish possess a certain melancholy and tendency towards drinking inherent in the bloodline (in case you didn't know) perhaps due to that history of poverty. But they also possess a wild sense of humor and witticism that shows up in all forms of their artistic expression.

I grew up in an Irish Catholic household. (My fathers side) No one in my family made art except for what you could call a creative streak in my mother, which she discovered later in life when she learned to crochet and macrame and then proceeded to macrame everything in sight in the 1970s.

Not my mother but you get the idea 

My early creative life in painting began with personal paintings that expressed some of the more sinister undertones of my upbringing in an alcoholic Irish family and my own melancholy.

Somewhere along the line, I stopped looking back, and began to express that wild humor and witticism that is also inherent in my genes, thanks to my Irish ancestors. Like many children of alcoholics, you don't get to have a childhood, and I think that my current work- the bright, colorful, whimsical stuff that should be the fabric of every child's world, has been called forth in me to express and share so that other's inner child will be called forth too.

I don't know where I got the talent for painting and pottery. Perhaps it is because I grew up in America and had more available to me. I'm also French and German and Czech. So maybe it came from there. I don't know. All I know is that I'm lucky to be an artist.  (yes, Irish lucky).

My Self Publishing Adventure -Part 2

Picking up from my first post I will continue with the creation of my book. The next step, once I had a clear idea of the story and the page layout was to begin refining the details.

I had to develop my characters  and be able to paint them consistently throughout the book.

 Millicent was a no brainer since I have painted over 100 cows, but Mouse was a new creation and so I had to play around with him a little bit and create him  in various moods and positions throughout the book.

And then there was the Farmers wife...

 I had to make a lot of decisions. One idea I had in an effort to shorten the length of the book was to have a  split illustration but I felt it was too distracting to one part of the story or the other.

  My work began with these line drawings and others that I would eventually turn into paintings. Stay tuned for those next time....

Learning to Draw and Paint

I have been blessed with a couple of happy, intelligent and talented art students. These girls came to me with a desire to learn to draw and paint beyond what they are getting in school. It gives my heart joy to see such enthusiasm in the kids. I really enjoy the one on one with them, so much different from being a classroom art teacher. There were plenty of kids who were there because they liked art and wanted to be there but unfortunately, there were several more who didn't and were constant distractions for the kids who had a real interest in art. I always felt bad that I often didn't have time to get to the kids who wanted to learn more because I had to deal with the kids who were acting out. Sometimes I could get those kids engaged too which felt good, but often not. Having kids in my studio is a real treat. I love chatting with them about their lives and seeing how quickly they pick up what I am teaching them.

I wish I could package the enthusiasm of 10 year old Mackenzie. Yesterday when we were doing a crayon resist drawing of a leaf and I told her to add some free form doodles around her leaf drawing, she got all excited and clapped her hands, and giggled and said "bluueeeee". (Her favorite color).

It never feels old hat for me when I make something new, there is an excitement and sometimes when I come up with something fun like my Oreos and Milk painting, I kind of tickle myself inside. But getting older seems to dull in many ways that unbridled joy that comes with being a kid, the discovery of a new technique, color, ability. Maybe that's why I've gotten so hooked on pottery now. It's a whole new playing field and each piece is a new challenge and opportunity to discover something new inside myself.

I am so pleased with Marlene and Mackenzie. They are very eager and pick things up quickly and it is delightful to see what they do.

We have a few more classes before the holidays. In January I may take on another student or two. I have room for maybe 1 more kid (age 10-14) and 2 adults. So contact me if you are thinking about taking on a new challenge yourself like my adult student Cindy, who is bravely stepping out there to learn something new.

Just featured in Another Beautiful Treasury!

This one is called Amour, Amour by MarilyndaGallery. and features my Mother and Child painting. Click on the image to check it out!