A Personal Loss Sparks a Change in my Art
The past couple of months have been difficult for me. Spending time away from home to be with my aging, failing mother and the worry over that, to her death a short time ago on February 28, 2011 seems only a short time, but I have felt disconnected and discontented from my art for a about three months.
I am still very much in a grief stricken state, but have painted for her, from my heart since her death and felt release of the grip of that crippling block of doubt and fear. My painting is comforting me a great deal these days.
How often have you been through a major life experience (such a paltry term for big important things) and found that it helped you reach the next level in your art? Enough times that you noticed it happens anyway!
Perhaps, like me, you have been struggling with mastering a certain process well enough to define and articulate it. I felt I was at point where I couldn't go further with trying to paint watercolours digitally in the style I wanted to. I was daunted by the amount I needed to learn to become a painter rather than someone who paints pretty stuff on her computer.
Everything I painted seemed so wrong and amateurish. More and more, I started paintings and couldn't be bothered finishing them. Blogging about your paintings and doing tutorials and demos when you feel like that is just about impossible.
Working on my eBook came to a dead halt when I realized I didn't want to teach what I already knew and had been blogging about for ages (it seems). I wanted to really master something and teach you the easy way to do it. Except I couldn't seem to define and articulate the "way to do it" any more. My techniques were changing and evolving.
Progress on the eBook was non-existent for almost two months. I got really stuck on trying to teach the basics of the Wet Watercolour Controls, because I wasn't using Painter 11's default Digital Watercolour brushes and even less the default Wet Watercolour Brushes.
How could I teach you to paint with brushes you don't have? You can get them with a little effort on the
Painter Talk Forum from Skip Allen. He has also given me permission to use all his brushes in my tutorials and in writing my eBook.
These are not the only watercolour brushes sets out there, just the two I happen to use a lot.
Somehow painting for my Mother, thinking of her, tears often pouring down my face I realized that my painting of the snowdrops came together much more easily than anything I had done for months. The "way to do it" was clear in my head. The "why to do it' was also really clear to me.
I used the sketch alone as part of the cover design on a
Celebration and Remembrance Mass Program for my mother. It can be seen in my gallery of Recent Work along with a poem she wrote. Other poems of hers were inside the Program.
I knew what I wanted to express with this painting. The symbolism of the snowdrops was central to the feeling of the painting.
My first thoughts were of “against difficult odds,” many together, first spring flowers, very clean and pure, and elegant in their simplicity. When I looked up the symbolism of snowdrops I found that they are thought to be “a simple, delicate symbol of hope, purity and consolation."
"
Teardrops in the Snow" is a literal, as well as a symbolic expression. Snowdrops look like tears to me, and very often the short walk to the Nursing Home from my sister's was often covered in fresh snow these past 2 months. It was the morning Mom died.
Having the opportunity to use my artwork on the Program and for the Thank You cards has been an honour and a healing act for me. I believe that my Mother can feel my love and thanks, even though she is not with us any longer.
She was never very effusive with her praise, but was always proud, if you had done your best. Perhaps because I was the tenth of fourteen children I felt the weight of unspoken Expectations, and heard the unspoken message of, "I expected no less from you."
We often spoke as adults in recent years of the need to create and express something, the process of learning our crafts, hers writing and mine painting digitally.
Thank you for reading this rather long and emotional post. I've long since come to terms with myself as a person that likes to express emotion and feel comfortable doing it. This has been cathartic.
Posted in Artistic Growth on March 12th, 2011.
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