Creative Progress (Fall 2024)

Symbol Collaboration

Screenshot of artist's phone

With each of the seven participating childbearers, I embarked on a brainstorming process. I had developed some concrete prompts to help get the juices going if needed, but we mainly relied on genuine discussions about the experience of childbearing. 

All seven people had a lot to say, and each conversation quickly developed rich themes, like duality, constant change, and what it is to have a ‘self.’ From there, some had a symbol come to them immediately. Others came to me with conceptual seedlings, such as a significant number, some fragmented mental images, or objects around their home that struck them as significant in the small hours of the night.

Details of four symbol source images

It was really fulfilling and humbling for me to be trusted with those fledgling ideas, to follow their logic intuitively, and to suggest concrete possibilities that could work in a painting and a still life. Shared creativity can feel like magic sometimes.

Once we had established symbols, it was time to make some images happen! My daughter has graciously allowed me to set up photography equipment in her playroom on photoshoot days. In October, I started hosting project participants one by one in my home ‘photography studio.’

Each childbearer made her own choices about what to wear, whether and where to sit or stand, and how to interact with and present her symbol. These decisions, on which I weighed in when requested, were guided by practical visual considerations but more deeply by a desire to deepen the story of the symbols meanings. The photographic portraits and still lives that I took in these sessions serve as my source images for the project’s fourteen artworks.

Artmaking

Detail of a painting in progress

As I began painting the portraits and creating the ink still-lives, I went through a period of uncertainty as I tried to find a way of working that felt true to the meaning of See Me Bearing. As I felt and experimented my way through, the language of art asserted itself to express the ‘Childbearer’ paradigm, in contrast to the ‘hero’ program.

For the portraits this meant that although the finished products will have largely traditional attributes, the underpaintings lay a less conventional foundation. Generally, I paint with techniques that lean towards verisimilitude, but this time I did not begin by mapping out the forms in an earth tone as the old masters did. Instead I scraped on the big shapes of the pictures in flat, loud colors with a palette knife. This bakes into the essence of what I hope will ultimately be dignified and sensitive paintings, a sense of chaos and play in the development of the forms, as well as an unabashed and earnest embrace of vibrant colors.

Detail of a painting in progress

For the still-lives, I chose black ink as my medium to promote a balance between a painterly quality (as companions to the portraits), and a graphic one (high-contrast and monochrome). I’m still settling into the hang of my inking technique, but but I’m finding my way to an expressive dance of brush and pen, combining naive, almost ‘wrong’ lines, and an overall convincing effect.

Detail of ink drawing in progress

The embrace of a little wildness and chaos in the oils and a pleasing level of naïveté in the ink drawings, for me, sings the song of the Childbearer. It’s eye-opening how much it has challenged me to let go of control and correctness, to take joy in the uncertainty of my path, to tell me ego, “No, not right now 💚.”