BLUE MADONNA/A PORTRAIT OF MOTHERHOOD
Why do we do art, what motivates us as artists to do what we do? Joy, love, anger, pain, sadness...emotions and shared human experiences are certainly one of the things that motivate all artists.
An artist is like a sponge that absorbs experiences around himself/herself and then expresses them back to others using color, shape, texture, line and space. Dance, drama, music, poetry, and visual arts can elicit feelings that are difficult to express in any other way. Complex feeling can be expressed through art...think of the aria in the movie Philadelphia when Andy knows he is dying and has no other way to express the sheer pain of leaving life and loved ones, other than to play his favorite opera La Mamma Morta, at full volume, sung at by Maria Callas until it encompasses his whole being. Or think of the play a Street Car Named Desire by Tennessee Williams, when Stanley cries out Stella in a soul riveting pleading sob. Contemplate the ballet Swan Lake, its tender tragedy and love story. These are the ways artists interpret and give back our inexpressible emotions to us. Aging of our parents and loved ones is not easy to look at and experience. It is a journey we all go on, unless a parent dies young. There are moments of joy, tenderness, and sadness on this journey. Everyday I go into my Mother's nursing home, into the alzheimer/dementia unit I am bombarded by sights, sounds and smells. I come away with feelings and emotions I do not know what to do with. The nursing home can be a drama of emotions on any given day. Adult children visiting alzheimer parents who no longer recognize them, patients who are robbed of their memory by dementia, the frustration of nurses trying to be patient when a patient screams and screams caught in a moment of confusion of where they are...sometimes it is no more that a tear sliding down a cheek or a head bent lost in a world of boredom...it is a bombardment of images and impressions. The smells of medicine, food, urine and antiseptics and the sounds of old movies droning away in the background effect other senses. One cannot walk away without feeling something and for an artist it is a hundred times so. Sometimes I think of Picasso's "Guernica" or Munch's "Scream" and then I think of Leonardo Da Vinci's pictures of aging or Renaissance pictures of Motherhood and religious icons.
I love this picture of my Mother, it is sad, it is tender, it is vulnerable. Mother is almost 99 now and at times aware and at other times not. She still knows me and my brother, she can still express her unconditional love she has always had for us. I have looked at this photo many times and felt a myriad of emotions. I have been reluctant to write and share because it is so close and personal to me. But like art ideas that come over and over to me, telling me they need to come in to creation, this one calls to me. It won't go away, I keep going back to this picture and thinking about it. Something about it seemed universal, beyond just an ordinary moment in the nursing home with Mom, it transcends the everyday to a shared human experience...it is persistent in my mind. What is it that I am being called to create, to express? Then I realized that the photo of my Mother wrapped in a blue blanket reminded me of Renaissance paintings I had seen before in art history studies and at the Ringling Museum of Art in Sarasota, Florida that has a large collection of Renaissance paintings. The photograph of my Mother takes on an iconic form to me, the Jungian idea Motherhood as an archetype, as a perfection of love and sacrifice-for my Mother truly embodied those qualities.if I know I will do an art work from this photo, from these experiences..but it has not yet completely formed in my mind as to how. But it keeps calling me, and I cannot ignore the call for long. I have thought about would my Mother mind me using pictures that show her in a vulnerable state, and I know in my heart she would not. She would tell me to reach out to others, help in anyway you can, touch others lives, give to others...that is the kind of person she is. So when I do this artwork it will be with her in mind, and with her guidance and love.
