Why I Paint

Facing fears of being predictable or boring

Before I became a mother, I was set on retaining bits of myself that weren’t touched by motherhood. I was attached to the notion that I could compartmentalize my life, I wanted to keep mothering in a box far away from my work as an artist. 

If you are a parent, then you know the naïveté of this idea. Reality quickly compromised my early compartmentalization approach, but I was still holding firm to the ideal of never making art on the topic of motherhood. It was too obvious a choice, too basic, too predictable.

But was it?

In the studio with my kiddos, July ‘24

The job of an artist is first to be a noticer, then to study, and finally to bear witness by turning that noticing into art, into conversation.

I wanted to approach the topic of mothering, parenting, and the monotony of life from a different angle. So much popular content involves either trad wives promoting unattainable presentations of motherhood or negative, child-bashing rhetoric. Neither of these expressions felt true to my own experience of raising children.

Finding this gap in the conversation is what pushed me to paint again. There is so much to be said on the ordinary. 

We are bombarded by messages that life must be spectacular (extraordinary?) to be meaningful. Every day and every experience must be cranked up to a level 10 to be valuable, to be worth sharing. But most of our lives are spent in the ordinary, in predictable routines, conversations rehashed, recipes repeated. 

Before I became a mother, I thought making art about the unremarkable moments of life would be … unremarkable. But isn’t that what we long for? To bring celebration to the unremarkable and forgettable moments. To slow down just enough to honor the simplicity of being present. 

That is why I began to paint again. To bring life and color to the humdrum of life. 

Embracing the convergence of my mothering and my art expanded my idea of what an artist could be, and who a mother could be. When I opened myself to the expansion each could continuously offer the other, I faced my fear that my mothering would limit my art instead of honor it.

Choking on my grief to see you so sweet

I still have a selection of pieces of work available from the initial collection. If you’re interested in learning more, I’d love to chat. The available work can be seen here.