Seasons of Making + Creating

Finding time and space to rethink the way I view creation has been challenging postpartum.

I’m not even talking about making art or creating — just even thinking about it as a concept.

All of my amazing mom friends have pretty much said the same thing — don’t be so hard on yourself, lean into this season, enjoy the time to just focus on baby, you’ll have your whole life to make art, art will still be there when you’re ready. (And so many other things that have truly soothed my anxious brain.)

Still, I’ve always had a practice and even as I lean into a season with less focus on “production” and more focus on nurture, to me it seems like I need to at least create some space for the practice of considering creation.

Today, for example, I just pulled my stuff upstairs, touched my paint brushes and my palette and my turp and moved stuff around. I pulled out some old pants to cut into rags. I made the decision to finish a painting just because.

I had the realization that maybe there’s a reason I’ve been painting the feminine for the last seven years. Not fully sure what this reason is but I know there is one. Maybe it’s a pull to uncover the hidden layers of ancient magic that lay beneath us women — the core of which has been felt by artists and depicted for centuries but never quite reached in full.

There’s always a deeper well, another layer. All of the pieces we tuck and fold and adjust to fit into the shapes we’ve been given to fill. What happens when they all come together?

Maybe this summer becomes about letting all of the pieces slowly meld together and reveal the entire picture, and maybe I don’t even need to try so hard to create it: simply let it emerge.