A Mother's Work

One of my favourite artists is Del Kathryn Barton from Sydney. Her work blows me away for so many reasons, for which, if you Google her and have a look at her work, you will understand. She just won the 2008 Archibald Prize and I love it that her self portrait "You are What is Most Beautiful About Me".....


is an acknowledgment of motherhood, her children and their importance to her life and her art. Some of her work is quite erotic and reminds me a little of Egon Schiele's paintings and drawings, another of my favourites. I'm really drawn to lines that are organic and 'imperfect' that appear to have not been corrected or premeditated. At art school we had a drawing tutor who had us do contour drawings for a year which were a revelation to me. Contour drawing if you haven't seen or tried, is just a technique where you look at the subject and not at your surface and draw what you see with one continuous line, so that the end result is bizarre and disproportioned yet often has uncanny likeness. It forces you to draw what you see rather than what you think you are seeing. I always struggled to get away from drawings that were too tight, to try to go back to the effortless, expressive images that children make. After doing hundreds of contour drawings without looking, I found I could render something very quickly whilst looking at the page now and then but without editing or thinking the drawing. I used to take my visual diary to cafes; hide it under the table and draw as many people as I could in the time I sat there. It was such a good time, passion and discovery. I didn't even do anything further with them it just felt good in the doing.

I'm not very good at giving myself time do things that are important to me, other than the love and commitment I put into motherhood which is almost enough on its own though I'm aware that when we feed ourselves creatively it feeds everyone around us too. I forget and I make motherhood a distraction from a huge part of my creative self, as my own mother did . I can so easily tell myself that it doesn't matter, that there will be time one day, whilst the voice inside me yells FORGET THE F*****G DISHES!!!

So thanks Del Kathryn Barton for reminding me and you too Esti and Fi and Bridge and all you other amazing artist mamas and papas out there. I'm going to get off the computer and draw something....