Looking to feel uplifted? Read on.

First, check out artist Denise Gasser on the April 18th episode of the Art Juice podcast. Even better, if you know a creative young mom who’s at a stage where she feels like she can’t keep her head above her parenting duties long enough to create the work she wants & needs to make, share it with her. Then go one step further and include the link to Gasser’s blog post “A Love Letter to Every Busy, Tired, Creative Mom“.

#215 ©2020 Denise Gasser, Mixed Media on wood panel, 7″ x 5″, from “Art After: Reconciling Art and Motherhood” I bought this painting for several reasons: First, its simplicity – only 3 elements, yet they speak volumes. Similar to a formal garden, I love the stark combination of geometric and organic shapes. And more sentimentally, it reminds me of the light and the sky in Hawaii, where we were living when I was at the stage of life when motherhood was all-consuming — with the added significance that it was during those years that I first happened upon working with textiles as a way of balancing creativity with motherhood.

While the gist of the podcast discussion surrounded social media and ways that it may be impacting and influencing our art, it wasn’t that aspect that caught my attention so much as when Gasser talked about her work as a facilitator. She mentors and inspires artist/mothers to continue with their art after motherhood despite feeling like there is no time (let alone an extra ounce of energy) for anything beyond being a parent.

In the video above, Denise shares how she worked through that issue herself with her series “Art After: Reconciling Art and Motherhood”. As a mother of four boys, the series was begun as a way to bring together, acknowledge and honor her dual roles as artist and as mom. Leaning into reality, she began making 5″ x 7″ paintings, working on each only until she was interrupted by her kids. On the back of each piece she documents the time spent on the painting and what interrupted her, as well as the number of the painting in the series.

More than 200 works later, she had the makings of a solo show. It’s such a great example of the empowering wisdom that taking even just one step a day will get you a lot farther after a week, a month, a year than not taking any steps at all.

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And then, looking at the other end of the age spectrum, I happened upon the Legendary Grannie Gang on Instagram last week and was absolutely smitten. Lovers of knitting, superheroes and fearless grannies: you too will find photographer Susanne Krauss‘ irrepressibly joyful portraits irresistible. I think we could all benefit from a bit of Granny Power these days.

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Springhouse ©2023 Elizabeth Fram, Watercolor, graphite and embroidery on paper, 5 x 5 inches. Spring may have been slow to come this year but the colors in the hills as the trees leafed out have been spectacular, more than making up for the delay.

Spring has been very slow to arrive on our hill this year. And while my perennials are gradually pushing up, the only real color that has broken through the drab grey-brown of our still mostly dormant yard and woods comes from the few crocuses the chipmunks missed, some strikingly blue scilla and hyacinths, and a handful of early daffodils.

These earliest flowers bring strong memories of my mother. When I was growing up, she never failed to point out and share her joy in the year’s first purple & yellow crocuses, caught in a patch of sun, often surrounded by snow. She would bring in pussy willows and force forsythia; her Korean azalea in full glory was a treasured marker of warm weather to come. In my mind, daffodils always seemed to be her flower. She called them “jonquils”, a name I’ve never heard anyone else use.

As a Pennsylvania transplant living in Maine, she relished spring’s hearty blooms, perhaps all the more because she’d learned not to trust that she’d seen the last of the snow until June. It wasn’t until I lived in PA myself and saw that spring there exists on a completely different plane from the ones we know in northern New England, that I could truly begin to understand what she must have been missing.

As I’ve looked out the window through the unrelenting rain this week, the sturdy yellow and blue blooms are a sweet sight. They are a harbinger of good things to come, a symbol of both dependability and of strength through adversity – all worthy metaphors for the woman who put her heart and soul into caring for us throughout the years. How appropriate that they are here just in time for Mother’s Day.

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Sally Swain’s 1988 humorous book Great Housewives of Art, is a compilation of paintings that pay homage to the wives and mothers of great artists who, like my mother, worked endlessly with intelligence and grace at home, making it possible for the rest of us to do as we chose. Check out Swain’s Facebook page for a glimpse her wonderfully clever work.

Elizabeth Fram

Eye of the Needle

Tag Archives: Spring Color

Empowerment

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Early Color