When moms paint

Putting the realities of motherhood onto a canvas

Expect this newsletter to be a little more personal as Women’s History Month hits just as I am knee deep in self-reflection about whether I am too selfish as a mother/artist/writer or not selfish enough as an artist/writer/mother.

Just as I’m all but drowning in that pool of annoying self-reflection the amazing Katy Hessel writes a great piece for The Guardian with the best title - Conflict, exhaustion, joy and pain: how Alice Neel shattered the taboos around motherhood. It is about Alice Neel giving the middle finger to expectations of how an artist mother must behave, prioritize her time, and parent while making art.

Oh, how I wish I had it in me to give the world the middle finger.

But maybe mother artists no longer have to pick one of two roads: to give the middle finger and forego parenting like the men used to do in favor of time at the easel. Or, just forego having children altogether in favor of making art.

Because there is a new road, one of an artist mother not just daring to have kids and interrupt her career, but daring to highlight the experience of motherhood in their art.

Yes, there is a precedent in art history of mom painters showing us life with kids. Mary Cassatt was pretty bold to risk being taken less seriously as an artist by having mothers and children as her primary subject matter. She even painted moments of breast feeding, like this 1890 painting “Maternity”.

But that isn’t how I remember breast feeding always being. Cassatt’s child is wearing a clean white outfit, the breast is unscathed, the child is not writhing about, looking around, causing breast milk to spray everywhere.

The calmness and cleanliness of Cassatt’s children is how we know we are only getting the romanticized version of mothering because real life children are almost never calm or clean.

Even when freshly washed and relieved of all obvious confections, children tend to be sticky.

Fran Lebowitz

And Cassatt’s kids were never, ever left on fire escapes so that Cassatt could paint as it was claimed that Neel’s daughter was. She even brought babies to boating parties. And look at this child: clean, well-dressed, not squirming or puking. Is Cassatt’s mother model having fun? No, but the baby isn’t eating her alive either, which is how parenting a baby can sometimes feel.

But over the past few years some great paintings by mom painters depict the reality of how it can feel to be a mother, that feeling of being eaten alive. And why does it matter that we are being offered a realistic take? Because, as Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer, the writer of an Art Forum cover story of painter Tala Madani puts it, “Art provides a safe space for imagining the unacceptable and thinking the intolerable.”

Madani happens to be one of my favorite contemporary painters. I love how she makes crass scenes of bodily fluids and body parts compositions of light and color and they become some sort of stained glass masterpiece. Madani is a color virtuoso with an amazing sense of the absurd, but she also she wields her paint as a weapon against so many social issues. That courage to show life as it is is never more so than in some of her “Shit Mom” paintings.

Madani said about ‘Shit mom” in an ArtBasel.com interview, “She’s being strangled by them and she’s used by them. Maybe she was even created by them. Maybe if there’s no mom, you would prefer to have a shit mom rather than no mother at all.’

Here is Laura Owens showing a mother getting torn apart by a baby, capturing exactly how it feels sometimes in those early years, that your body is not your own, that your baby has zero physical boundaries, and that the creature you gave birth to is there to eat you alive and pull your hair.

Or is the baby just clawing at her artist mom for more attention? Is the babytTrying to pull the mom’s attention away from the canvas?

As a mother artist/writer I have read Claire Dedier’s What Do We Do with the Art of Monstrous Men? in the Paris Review maybe twenty times as she writes about the selfishness required to be an artist:

"I have to wonder: maybe I’m not monstrous enough. I’m aware of my own failings as a writer—indeed I know the list to a fare-thee-well, and worse are the failures that I know I’m failing to know— but a little part of me has to ask: if I were more selfish, would my work be better? Should I aspire to greater selfishness?

Every writer-mother I know has asked herself this question. I mean, none of them says it out loud. But I can hear them thinking it; it’s almost deafening. Does one identity fatally interrupt the other? Is your work making you a less-good mom? That’s the question you ask yourself all the time. But also: Is your motherhood making you a less good writer? That question is a little more uncomfortable.”

Tracy Emin famously said about this paradox: “There are good artists that have children. They are called men.”

I no longer buy that approach. I suspect that for all those years the problem was that the art world would not reward women for painting about the subjects that most impacted their lives, like motherhood or gender disparity or any number of issues. So women were forced to retreat from their best ideas. That is no longer the case thanks to recent power shifts and enlightenments. Mom artists can paint the experience of motherhood in any way they want. Look at the amazing art being mad as a result, works by artists like Madeline Donahue and her wild, graphic world full of nosy, bothersome children and their props.

I have painted my children many times and in general they are clean in the paintings, at least they are cleaner than they are in real life. I’ve painted them in bars.

Asleep.

Keeping me awake:

And I’ve even done paintings in collaboration with them. In the following painting I laid down on a canvas painted full of flowers and asked my daughter to outline my body in paint. The result is a ghostly image of a half-there person, a wispy shadow of my former self. I called the piece “Irrelevant” because of how frequently you can feel that way as a mother/parent/artist/wife.

Who Needs a Muse? What inspiration can you take out of this new, more honest depiction of mother hood? Maybe you are inspired to paint your own version of motherhood. Maybe you are a Cassatt type and you paint your peaceful non-sticky baby sleeping. Maybe you are a shit mom and you paint the destruction your toddler leaves in his wake. Maybe you are inspired by Donahue to paint a day in the life, the props, the balancing acts, the home filled with the joys and distractions of parenting. Maybe you paint your own self portrait as you see yourself as a mother.