I Need A Wife Too

Janis Mars Wunderlich, ceramic artist, and mother of five.

I'm sitting here this morning with a head full of to do's: stack wood, gather kindling, wash and hang out the laundry, pick up the house, scrub bathrooms, process tomatoes, make and freeze batches of basil, sort mail, plan and make supper, tend to my Etsy business...

It's a gorgeous day, and I have the luxury of being home to do these things. Tomorrow will be a studio day when I drive to Portland and get to focus, for a few hours, entirely on my art. Our children are grown and flown, and my husband, who works full time as a hospital pharmacist, helps a bit with the housework and alot with the cooking responsibilities. I now have the opportunity to balance home and art. (It hasn't always been this way - I've struggled mightily to make it so. These are internal and external struggles...) Yet I still experience inertia and conflict, and often feel guilty packing up and heading to the studio, when there is "more productive" work to be done at home. And there are still days when I wonder what it would be like to have no domestic responsibilities - to awake like Picasso, and know that my wife has already peddled her bike to the studio to get the fire going in the woodstove, and that she will make all my meals and clean my house, and to grab paints and clay first thing in the morning (not frying pans and wash rags) and to start creating, and to create all day, everyday. (And to know that just my signature will fetch thousands of dollars would be pretty damn sweet, too!!!)

(Would I even want this, though? Do I need the domestic to anchor me? Or is that me rationalizing my conditioned life and what is expected of me??)

I need a wife too is one of the discussion topics in the Who Does She Think She Is? home party pack that I recently ordered on-line. I plan to show the DVD at MECA soon, and host a discussion. There are many more provocative questions posed on a set of enclosed cards, such as this one:

What would be lost if you lived your dream?

On the Line with Nancy Spero

I’ve always wanted my art to be something that would not be acceptable in the usual daily, ordinary, polite way of ­communicating. ~ Nancy Spero

Nancy Spero

Sheela-na-gig at Home

Martha Miller

Untitled, 1984

Mentors show up in various guises at unexpected times and places, and we sometimes don't recognize a mentor until after the fact. I've recently been wracking my brain trying to remember Nancy Spero's name. One of my professors at MECA showed me pictures of a mural that she'd made. And when she died last year, I saw images from her riveting Maypole installation that have stayed with me. Today her name finally came up to the surface and when I researched her a bit, I found Sheela-na-gig at Home. Timely, in that I was taking pictures of my women ancestor portraits under the clothesline yesterday. While I've been working on these portraits of the older generations of women in my family, I've been wondering alot about the emotional truth of their lives, searching their faces for clues. What was it like to be a woman in the late 19th century? What loving habits and what painful dysfunctional behavior got passed down to my generation? Did these women yearn to be something other than housewives and mothers? I have struggled mightily with the duality of being a mother and an artist. When I was a young mother I had a fury inside that was so powerful I thought it would destroy me if I allowed myself to feel it. It frightened me terribly and I tried to keep it pushed down for years. It would not stay down and erupted as panic attacks and depression. I did not have balance in my life. I was not doing my art. Not the art that I needed to do.

Seeing Spero's work on-line today made me pull out this old painting of mine once again. I really need to attach it to a board - it's been folded up in my closet. This speaks to the level of shame I still harbour about creating it. When my father saw it years ago, it must have frightened him, because he looked at it and said, There is something wrong with you. This hurt. My father loved me, but he was a man of his generation. He was quite controlling of my mother, and she dealt with it by being passive and secretive and she went underground with her needs. I sometimes wonder, what would it have been like to have a mother like Nancy Spero? Someone who would have celebrated the imagery in this painting, which I made after the birth of my fifth child, and then found the courage to return to school and take this one class? But other mothers, and as I mentioned above, mentors, show up at unexpected times and places. I am amazed this morning to see Spero's sheela-na-gig's on the clothesline. I painted that crouching figure in my piece all those years ago without ever having heard of a sheela-na-gig. I painted her at the top of that doorway to say, See? See here: this is your destiny. I was trapped in the old patriarchal system, and raging to bust out. I wanted to be a mother, but I wanted to be an artist, too, and I was just starting to figure out that I could do both...

Happy Mother's Day!

Whoa, Mom! Can't you take it? All these big babies...