On art and motherhood
Gifts, frustrations, honest feelings
When I think about being an artist as a mother, my first instinct is to complain.
Certainly when I talk to my friends who are both artists and mothers we spend a lot of time sharing our frustrations. The annoyance of having to pack our paints away so soon after setting up, to accommodate our slivers of childcare. The irritation of leaving for pick up just when we are finding a flow with our work. The inevitably of disrupted work as the self-employed parent in the family. The ways that carrying, birthing and feeding children steal your time, energy, wellness, creativity.
(I am going to stop here and say: I love being a mother. I love being an artist. I feel deeply grateful and dizzy with joy to be both. I love my child so much I could cry right now. But I also want to be honest because social media makes everything look easy and perfect and that’s not anyone’s truth)
Back to complaining!
Many of these thoughts will also apply to creatives who need to work other jobs that inconvenience their art practise. And I’m sure these frustrations feel familiar to any self-employed parent. But I do think there is a particular disharmony when your work is creative and depends on a certain unrestrained and flowing energy. Kids don’t care about that. Or rather, they have that naturally for themselves and so there is no room for yours.
Their needs, of course, are constant and immediate. The structures of childcare (if you are lucky enough to have it) are restrictive. Sleep deprivation kills creativity as your body uses any scrap of energy to stay alive, functioning and present. None of this is conducive to finding that vital unbound time in which to experiment, develop and muse ideas.
My friend and I have spent many hours discussing our envy for child free (and usually male identifying) artists whose careers are flourishing. We lament the ways in which our choices may have held back our careers, clipped our art wings. We think of the retreats we could go on, the unbound hours we could spend making work, the networks we could be networking.
We talk about this and then we talk about how much we love our children.
How grateful we are. How annoying being a mother can be. How joyful! How pregnancy sickness, and breastfeeding, and exhaustion have dampened our careers. How we have lost autonomy over our own time. How powerful and big and overwhelming our love for our children is. How no one can have it all. How grateful we feel. How frustrated we are.
And yet.
When I slow down and reflect on how the past almost 5 years of motherhood have impacted my art, I see how my practise has cracked open and become much bigger. How something new and unexpected has flooded out, unbound and powerful.
I can think of many ways that, unexpectedly, having my child has made me a better artist:
In the beginning, it was circumstantial. In 2020 my husband lost work thanks to the pandemic so we decided he would spend a year as the primary care giver to our son who had just turned one. I had to earn our living but had lost my commercial illustration and fashion work (my main careers at that point) thanks to pandemic and baby. I had a lot of big feelings to get out (pandemic, baby). I had to work from home so I could breastfeed (baby). We were in the Scottish countryside, staying with my parents. I looked around me at this wild landscape I had grown up with.
I started to paint.
I kept going. I experimented. I listened to my intuition. After a decade as an illustrator and fashion art director I was excited not to be bound to the creative direction of others. (Sometimes I love this! But this new freedom was liberating). Painting has become my main career now and I love it and I am so grateful for those strange and scary circumstances that pushed me here.
This new freedom to paint has meant that my style, which had been much more controlled, loosened up. I give less of a shit about having things look a certain way. I got more honest with myself. I found joy. I released tension. Painting has become a kind of therapy for me, a balm for the stresses of parenting (amongst other things! life!) and so in this way the art and the mothering kind of feed into each other and go round and round. Painting releases my feelings and settles my nervous system so that I can be a more patient parent (sometimes!). It is a huge relief to get out of my thinking mind and be in my body.
Details from some new paintings I am working on The short periods of time in which I have to fit my work have encouraged me to paint more quickly. To be less precious. To be more in touch with my intuition and not overthink things. This has hugely affected the way my art looks, I think for the better.
I love to watch my child paint. I know it is a cliche to talk about the freedom of children making art, but the ferocity and joy with which he plays with colour and shape has been incredibly inspiring for me. I can see now with hindsight that his art making has impacted my art making. I am working to unwind years of conditioning that made me value control and perfectionism. I am working to get back to some of the authenticity and wildness with which he moves a paint brush.
I’m not saying he is a genius ( I definitely think he is a genius) but his paintings are magical to me. He reminds me to be bold. To do less. To be instinctive and to stop when I’m done.
My muse I am more comfortable in my Divine Feminine energy. I am no longer trying to be an artist in a masculine way (I’m not talking about gender here but the energies we all have within us), nor would my lifestyle as a mother allow me to be. So I am leaning into my feminine energy - feelings, wildness, rest, tenderness, intuition - and letting that flow through my work. I think it makes my paintings more meaningful, and more authentic to who I am.
Sometimes, sometimes, we have these magical times where Lundy will agree to paint beside me at the same time that I am painting. This might last 10 minutes (at most!), and the price I pay is a child with very expensive taste in paint, but oh these moments are so special to me. Pure joy.
A rare moment where he agreed to use kids paints instead of the good stuff
So I guess what I am saying is: yes it is hard and yes it is magical and yes it is very messy.
This is love. Grateful for it all.
Thank you for being here for this very long and vulnerable essay! And thank you for waiting longer than usual for this post because, as it turns out, trying to move house and create for an exhibition and parent at the same time is quite hectic.
If you are interested in art and mothering, my friend Bekka Palmer curated a reading list HERE
If you are an artist and a mother please let me know how you do it!
Thank you for being here.
Katy x
This resonated deeply! I am not an artist but am a mother and try to work creatively around the edges, it is not easy but also wonderful. It’s neither and both and everything! xx
Nodding vigorously to all of this