Being everything all at once
and failing at boundaries.
Gioia’s process: draw, dance around, take off clothes, repeat. Similar to my own.
It’s been a month of signals, challenges, and invitations. Eclipse season? Election season? Equinox into Autumn? 21st century general angst and insanity?
Yes.
Some of the best challenge/invitations have been around loosening my borders. Letting things blur a little, then redraw my boundaries. Over and over.
My friend Meghann, at the opening of “Host”, exhibit by Walshe at The Contemporary Austin.
I was exposed this month to the work of Katarina Janečková Walshe, through her exhibition and talk at The Contemporary Austin. Her approach to art & motherhood is undiluted. Her older daughter was in her studio full-time for three years, without any other infrastructure for her care. So Katarina’s art became a blend of nursing, sleeping, and painting together. When her second daughter came along, it was second nature to be all together in the studio. They paint on all her paintings, writing their names, adding a handprint or heart, a splash of ink.
It was shocking, inspiring, harrowing, threatening. Katarina has the trappings of the mother-goddess, with her long hair, her lithe body, her capacity to care and create, seemingly without end. From my journal, after her talk:
There is an always-failing quality, it’s called comparison. I am ashamed that I’m not more intense. I am grateful that I’m not more intense. I am grateful for the intensity of my life and the gratitude it has given me for simple things. What a mess.
I remember the relief of being alone in my studio after birth. And the muddled combo of “I don’t deserve this / I’m so glad for this,” when at one year, Gioia went into daycare. Such an easy, dangerous move, to look at our own comfort and think it ruined us from the incredible thing we could have been, if pushed just a little harder.
I still have my young children for material and collaboration. I’ve been bringing them into the studio on weekends, to paint, play, sing, drum. Gioia chooses the colors and her marks start the direction. Nino makes haphazard strokes in crayon wherever he likes. Then, when they’re at daycare, I continue where it leads me.
I keep not being done with postpartum. I keep not being done with motherhood feeling central to my art life. So that’s what it is. It’s ok. It’s actually nice, to remember that I own all my experience and can draw from it anytime.
The invitation is to let it all in and see what’s there in the debris to surprise me. There, in the poor night’s sleep, in the mess of plastic toys, in a house covered in yogurt.
Joey Fauerso, another artist-mother I admire, who recently spoke at First Light Books about her new book, You Destroy Every Special Thing I Make, has this advice: “If something is getting in the way of your work, if should become part of your work.”
Hands On. 138x94”. Acrylic, Flashe, gesso, cardboard, string, chrysanthemum petals on raw canvas. 2024. The first revelation to paint with my hands, an act that felt like mothering.
coming in November…
I’ll be participating in the Austin Studio Tour, November 16-17, at KRDB. I’ll be showing an array of works from 10 years ago, to not quite finished yet. My paintings have outgrown my studio, so these architects have been kind enough to give me the wall space. Please come say hello! It’s the only time I’ll be displaying work in Austin for the foreseeable future.
In 2007, my first tour, I was stop #2. This year I’m stop #374! My, how we’ve grown.
If you’re in Dallas…
I have work up at the Kips Bay Decorator Show House, a fundraiser for The Boys & Girls Club, opening October 24. I have a piece at Process Home’s Pop-up with Selby House, through November 16. (It’s there, behind the display of chairs, on Selby’s homepage.) Thanks to CoCollect for placing these works.
Hide. 130x51”. Acrylic, ink and Flashe on raw canvas. Painted on both sides. 2016. In the studio, and at Process.
Tell me, what invitations/challenges has this season brought you? What doubt has been scraping at your heart? (Thank you, Helen, for sending this to me, and getting me out of my own doubt-spiral to write this letter.)
Read Timothy Snyder's new book, On Freedom . . . then paint!