Children, a Nest Evolution and SOS

I want to tell you about a new series I'm working on but first a little history... Some of you may be familiar with my Silent Voices series. If you look up top at the tabs you can find the series there. It's not complete but I will be adding more work there soon. To see the full series to date on my website click here. Anyway, that series is about infant adoption from my experience - the first/birth mother's point of view. In a few of those paintings I used the nest symbol as part of the work. From there I started exploring the bird nest as the main subject for my work and I LOVE doing them. If you go to my website you'll see a lot of them there. What does this have to do with the new series?

Don't Forget

18x24

Over the last couple of years I've watched the stories about children at the border being held in detention camps or being taken from their families and flown to states far away to be put in foster homes with strangers. For many of us in the adoption community those stories are horrifying because we're all too familiar with the trauma of losing a child. First mothers know what it's like to have a child taken away. Adoptees and foster youth are too familiar with the loss of families.

I've watched year after year the stories of children dying in school shootings and nothing seems to stop them from happening. We see a story, shake our heads and scroll on to the next story. Just another day in the US. I recently saw an article saying that this past March was the first March without a school shooting since 2002. What a horrible statistic. And speaking of school, I've also seen articles about people debating whether or not children should be provided free meals at school. Why would anyone want a child to go hungry??

In the big business of domestic infant adoption, babies are only valued as commodities. Some people don't think children should get meals from the school system. School shootings don't seem to stop unless there's a pandemic keeping kids home from school. Why don't we value our children more? Why aren't we keeping them safer? Why have we forgotten the little ones at the border or the ones who were sent away? Why do so many live in poverty here?

I'm calling this series Don't Forget. It's my way of bringing attention to children. I'm including something related to babies and children with my nests as a reminder of children's needs. Too often they're the forgotten ones because the wants of adults end up overriding the needs of children. Money, egos, and adult desires get in the way of doing what's right for them.

For any paintings I sell from this series I'll donate 10% to Saving Our Sisters, an organization near and dear to my heart. Their focus is family preservation and saving vulnerable pregnant women from the predatory infant adoption industry. SOS and their "sisters on the ground" bring emotional and financial help to expectant moms so they can keep and raise their babies.

The piece above, Don't Forget, is the first painting in the series. Below are the next 2. I'll share more as I do them. I'd love to hear your thoughts about these and maybe even some suggestions for different items to include in future paintings.

Remembering

20x16

Invisible

16x20

The nature inspired nests and the adoption inspired nests are coming together in this new group. Working in a series can be a powerful way to evolve but that's a topic for another post.

Be safe, healthy and creative!

Love

C

Finding Peace

I need some color, some lightness, some vibrancy. The last couple of weeks have been very hard. In fact this year has been hard. A lot has been going on in my life since 2018 began, starting with my father's death in February. Just a week after the funeral I had to begin the process of refinancing my house so I was rewarded with 2 months of banking hell. Then not long after the closing my mom ended up in the hospital because of an accident- thankfully she's ok now. And of course we have the national news..... 

In a previous post I talked about being included in the Professional Artist magazine article called Get Inspired by Darkness. In it I talked about my Silent Voices series and painting through the grief of being a mother of adoption loss. Well, because of that loss and knowing what it's like to have a child taken from me I'm having a particularly hard time with what's happening to migrant children right now. I don't know what those families have been through to get here but I do know what they're experiencing after they arrived and their children were taken away. I know the terror and grief. Hearing the audio, the cries of little ones was too much. I found myself sobbing for the babies who need to be back with their mothers. I'm doing what I can to help the cause but I also need to do something to keep myself from sliding down into despair. I've toyed with some ideas for a concept piece about the situation but it's not coming together yet.

So, now what I'm doing is painting light, color, and things that remind me of life such as the bird nests. I did the first Color Dance painting a little while ago and decided I needed to do more so recently I did #'s 2 and 3. And, I have to admit, I love fall color because it reminds me that this Florida summer heat won't last forever.  :)

Color Dance

16x16

Color Dance 2

16x8

Color Dance 3

16x8

Below is the newest nest painting. This one along with 3 others just made their way to my gallery rep in Tallahassee- Signature Art Gallery. I think this one is my favorite so far. I want to do more with that format when I get some new canvases.

In the Shadows

6x12

And here, a new one in progress. This is what I need right now- life affirming images and a process that keeps me going. Getting immersed in playing with gold leaf, squishing paint around, throwing splatters of golden yellow, these things will keep my spirits up and keep me going and sane in what seems like an insane world. 

One other thing helps this summer... playing with grandbabies and going to the beach. Ah... salt air!

If you paint, keep doing that. If you sing or play an instrument, please make more music. We need inspiration. If you have grandbabies, make a play date because we also need more smiles right now.

Til next time... check out the rest of the nest and landscape paintings at my website.

Peace

Be brave, be bold, go paint!

Soooooo........ I'm excited about the June/July issue of Professional Artist magazine. Thea Fiore-Bloom is this wonderful writer who thought I should be included in her article about inspiration. I finally got a copy and I couldn't be happier! If you can, pick up a copy and read the article titled Draw Inspiration from Your Dark Side. In it she talks about finding inspiration in the hard times. Sometimes going through trauma can bring you to a new place in your art if you're willing to be vulnerable. For me, it's the Silent Voices series.You can see them by clicking on the tab above. That series then led to the bird nest series. You just never know where an idea will take you.

You can see some of the nests by clicking the Nest tab above or to see even more click here to go to my website. If you can't get to a bookstore you can order a copy here.

The "catching up" post- painting, portraits, coloring books and censorship

Wow, almost a year to the day since the last post! That is way too long!
So what have I been up to- let's see.....

Painting, painting and more painting.
Did multiple portrait commissions.
Designed and published the Masterpeace Mandala coloring books- yes, my husband and I put our skills together and jumped on that bandwagon.
Had a solo exhibition at the 567 Center for Renewal in Macon GA.
Changed a few things around on the Etsy shop
Spent a week at the beach.
Spent a week in Ohio with daughter and grandkids.
Spent the holidays in Texas with my other daughter and grandson.
Spent 3 more weeks in Texas helping my daughter when she had baby #2.
In between those trips there was more painting and working on my website.
Teaching art classes on Mondays.

I think that's it. I don't think I left out anything major. And I think the traveling will slow down this year. Of course it would be a huge help if my daughters would just move to FL!

Ok, back to the work.....

The landscapes

Golden Edge

12x12

Gold Sky Woodland

12x6

Spring Pink

12x12

These are some of the newest paintings from my studio. I'm having fun with the gold leaf again- can you tell? :) Sales at the Signature Gallery in Tallahassee and the Macon Arts Alliance in GA have been picking up- yay! My next step will be to add another gallery to the list. I'm not sure which area I want to approach so if you have any ideas about where my work would fit in, feel free to share.

The solo exhibition

BFA

48x36

This is one of the pieces from the Silent Voices series. I have 16 paintings in this series so far, all the same size. This was the group of work for my solo exhibit in GA. It caused quite a commotion and 3 of the paintings were censored from the show!! Every weekend for the duration of the show the paintings had to come down and were rehung on Mondays- not kidding! If you want to see the pieces that were censored and why, check out the post I did on my other blog. To see the rest of the pieces in the show, go to the Symbolic page on my site. 

The portraits

I've done several portrait commissions but this one I did for myself. My granddaughter was hanging out at the house with us one night. She had wrapped a blanket around herself and was just being goofy and making faces. I grabbed the camera and took a lot of shots and decided to compile some of them into the 6 Faces of Maxine. It's colored pencil on red Canson MiTeintes and let me tell you.... skin tones on red paper is a challenge!

The coloring books

Coloring books?! Yep, we made coloring books. There are actually 3 coloring books and 3 coloring journals. We thought it would be fun to make mandala designs and patterns inspired by line drawings of the masters. So far we have Da Vinci, Michelangelo and Mucha. In the journals we have pages that are lined and some unlined and some that have coloring designs or edges. Since this kind of work is not something I normally do it was quite the learning curve for me. Getting to know the programs required to do the designs took some time but once I got it down it was a lot of fun.

I think this catches us up and hopefully I can get back to posting here on a regular basis now that life is getting a little more regular again. So in the meantime, check out the links, leave comments here or there.... let me know what you think. And Happy 4th of July! Hope it's a great weekend.

Painting Through the Emotional Stuff

It's December 26th and I've survived yet another onslaught of holiday crazy. 4 family birthdays were celebrated along with the winter solstice and I still managed to renew my car tags in time. Go me! Yes, me and my husband both are Christmas week birthdays so we both have to renew the tags.

In looking at the year ahead and looking back at the year just past, I've been thinking about what to share on this blog. Of the art stuff, that's pretty obvious but I've wondered about sharing more.

The painting above was the first one I did in the Silent Voices series. It's the only one done with colored pencil on illustration board. The others are acrylic on canvas. Anyway... this piece started with a pencil sketch on newsprint that I had done years before. The sketch was like my way of getting some thoughts down about my experience with adoption. I've mentioned in other posts before about being a mother of adoption loss and I have the other blog that's specifically about adoption if you're interested in reeeeaally delving into that topic. For a long time I thought it would be best to keep the two blogging worlds apart but they overlap so much anyway and they're both such a humongous part of who I am that I figured, what the hell, let the worlds collide. What's the worst thing that could happen? People get to know me and why I'm painting some strange things. Some folks might not like it and that's ok. Not everyone is going to like everything I do. Some might find it disturbing or depressing and some might relate to it or find it touches them in some way.

So...... back to the piece above. Have you ever had a painting experience where you go into the studio and about 9 or 10 hours later you come out - you haven't stopped, you haven't eaten, you haven't even left the room? While you were working you were excited or you cried or you were just so intent on the work that you had no concept of time and it was like it wasn't even you doing the painting. For me, doing that piece, it was all of the above. All I remember is standing over the drawing board grinding color in with the pencils and mashing color around with brushes and mineral spirits, sometimes wiping it away and then grinding more color in again.

There are 3 letters in the painting......

They stand for Baby for Adoption. Those letters were written with black marker on a piece of red construction paper and taped to the door of my hospital room when my first child was born. That let the hospital staff know that I wasn't supposed to see or hold my baby. You see, she was taken from me in the delivery room and whisked away. That's what happened to mothers like me years ago when we were forced to surrender our children because we were single.

It's a soul shattering experience. It left me broken and this fractured image of myself is what came out on paper. The painting was like a compelling, self imposed therapy and I'm truly fortunate that I have a way to get this stuff out! How do you cope with a tragedy this huge when you don't have a creative outlet? Do people just slowly go insane? Who knows where I'd be if it weren't for art. During that pregnancy is when I got my first set of colored pencils. Coloring was a way to kill time when I sat in the home far from my own home. I had to be hidden when I started to show so I left for another town and hunkered down till it was over - just me and my colors stashed away where no one could see us. I painted with bright color, day in and day out. Maybe I was hoping for some glimmer of brightness to show up and rescue me- don't know what form that would have taken. All I could think to do was bury myself in the forms so I wouldn't have to dwell on what was about to happen. Strange organic shapes showed up on the paper. I don't remember ever making marks that resembled anything. They grew across the paper and morphed into more weird bulbous things that were red and purple and blue.

Over the years those shapes changed and became the ideas and images in this series. Instead of just odd forms, words and symbols became the basis of the work. I kept a journal and started making lots of notes, writing lists of words, doing research about the adoption industry, and just remembering. I still work this way and sometimes as I do this I'm angry and sometimes I cry. Sometimes when I finish a painting I just sit and stare at it. I keep the journal with me most times when I'm working on the series because phrases will come to me and I might end up with a narrative poem that fits the work.

Now here I am, decades later and I'm not only back to painting about adoption but blogging about it, writing about it and talking about it. You'd think I'd have wound down by now but I guess when something this emotionally charged happens to you it overflows into the rest of your life. It changes so much of who you are that it can't help but affect everything else that you do. If you want to see some more of the work in this series just click on the Silent Voices tab at the top of the page.

Does anyone else have a personal experience - happy or sad - that played such a big role in their painting life? I'd love to hear about it. Better yet..... share pictures with me! I'd love to see!!

I hope ya'll had a good holiday, whatever you celebrate, and I refuse to get all worked up over which words of a happy sentiment are being offered. Just ignore the nonsense, be happy and Happy/Merry (insert season or holiday of your choice). 

:-)

I'm Back!

Yep, I know..... it's been way too long since posting here. This last year has found me a little scattered and trying to do too many different things - not only in the studio but online also. Too many social media sites can suck you in so I'm narrowing my focus to posting here, my Facebook page and my Etsy shop. Ok, so I can't leave Pinterest out. I'll be there too. The stack of hats I've been wearing has gotten pretty tall so it's time to clear out some clutter. Maybe if I wear fewer of them I can work more on quality rather than quantity. I think the problem with a lot of us creative types is we like to do a variety of things and that can lead to overwhelming ourselves with choices and projects. So now I'm turning my focus to the things I love most. After all, why would I want to focus more on something I don't really want to do? Makes sense right?

In painting there are 2 topics I'm most passionate about - nature and adoption. My abstracts and landscapes are both about nature. The Silent Voices series is about adoption from an original mother's viewpoint.
You can tell from the tabs above that I like to work in series. I just added 7 new pieces to the abstract section and the landscapes are ongoing. In fact I'm getting ready for a new show in February '14 in Macon GA at The 567 Center for Renewal art gallery. I love working back and forth between these two series. After a long stretch of painting landscapes it's fun to loosen up with some textures and layers in the mixed media work.

Of course the Silent Voices series is near and dear to my heart. It's a very personal series about my own story so between shows I'll be adding to that group of work also. I'm constantly thinking about it, sketching and writing down lists of words that could be included on another canvas or the narrative poetry that goes with it.

This is where I am on this beautiful December day in Florida. I'm enjoying the warm weather and looking forward to a new creative year. I hope you've been well and will come back to visit, maybe leave a comment or two.

Silent Voices in a book

I've put together 11 paintings and accompanying poetry from the Silent Voices series to create a book. I've been working on this series for the last couple of years and decided it was time to start working on exhibition proposals. Since it can take a long time to get on a schedule I'll continue working on the series while submissions are going out. My idea was to produce a book that I could use as part of the proposal package. I tried a few print on demand sites and had some issues with template formatting or user friendliness. I spend a ton of time on the computer but that certainly doesn't qualify me for the Geek Squad. So anyway, I looked into Amazon - duh.... I love them and my Kindle. Now the series is in book form. Check it out - it's available here in paperback and here for Kindle. Of course it's in color so it would look best on a Kindle Fire and if you're a Prime member you can borrow it for free.

I'm almost done with painting #12 so I'm heading to the studio. Hope you're doing something creative today. Peace.

I've been bouncing back and forth between 2 different series lately. You know I've been painting landscapes like crazy and I'm still doing that but I also needed to get back to the Silent Voices series too. Here's the latest painting in each of those groups.

Calloway Garden

12x12

acrylic

This one is painted from a photo that my mother took in Calloway Gardens in Georgia. It's a little different than the other landscapes I've done. I hadn't done anything with such an abundance of flowers. It was a challenge but I loved it.

Below is the latest in Silent Voices. It's the most autobiographical in the series. Some of the pieces in this series now include prose. As I pull out the older pieces and sit with them for a while I may write prose for them also. I'm finding that it gives the paintings a new level of depth and understanding.

BFA

 (baby for adoption)

48x36

acrylic

Fractured and broken in shades of grey.

The stories are sealed, the secrets not lies.

A life hidden and changed,

kept in tidy boxes so as not to disturb

the shining image of others.

Black on red, the letters controlled.

The signs were there, sending two lives down different roads.

One life unknown, the other unseen.

Imagination and grief hold hands under the mask

until the friction chafes and burns

with the once a year flame.

The lids break open, the cracks widen.

The flames get higher, the ash deepens.

Take cover.

Let the fire heal and the wounds return

to the soothing shadows.

New series, new page

Hidden in shame lies are told
about us, by us.
Gratitude for sacrifice slams the door.
Our motherhoods removed
they think, they wish.
Behind the door our hearts beat, our arms empty, we wait.
Our children grow, we search and find.
Sometimes good, sometimes sad
but still we sit.....

Huddled together, a group outside.
The mainstream flows, comforted in their easy belief.
We push against the current hoping to get through.
Again the door slams shut.
Again we lean a little harder.
A small wave of light escapes from beneath.
Our stories are read.
Replies come fast and furious to put us in our place.
"just because you had a bad experience" they said.

Behind the door the words get larger.
Through mothers in exile silent voices heard.

I started a new page on the blog. If you want to see more please click on the link above called Silent Voices. I usually post these pieces on my adoption blog because they are about my experience as a mother of adoption loss but I decided to share them here also because they are after all - paintings. I've included the writing that I do to give a sense of the feeling behind the artwork.

The piece above is called Mothers in Exile (I'm sure you guessed that) and it was done on 300lb watercolor paper. I mainly used acrylic but also added a colored pencil piece that I had started years ago but never finished - that's the door part of the painting.  I cut letters out of a magazine and for a textured design element I added tissue paper that I then used white acrylic to dry brush and accent the texture.

So there it is, another series that's ongoing.

Remember the tree?

You saw this one in an earlier post - I just had the tree blocked in. This was my focus for most of the weekend. I really felt the need to get back to work on the oil painting and something that has a lot of personal meaning for me. Once I figured out how I wanted to proceed I jumped back in. I'm not finished with the tree yet and I still might add some more stars in the area surrounding the egg and nest. When I'm done I'll shoot a better photo (one that doesn't include bands of light coming in from the blinds) Overall I'm happy with the progress.  Comments?