Imaging Imogen

Judy Dater
Imogen Cunningham and Twinka

Henry Swift
Portrait of Imogen Cunningham

Imogen Cunningham

Self-portrait, 1932

Imogen Cunningham

Self-portrait, 1974

Imogen Cunningham

Self-portrait, 1974

Another artist to add to my Who I Want to be When I Grow Up list...

(My apologies about the spacing - I edit it, and then when I publish the post, it's all wacked. Does this happen to anyone else? How do you fix it??)

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...

Marlene Dumas

One of my students recently introduced me to this South African artist's powerful, emotionally raw portraits. Wonderful! Her wall full of faces reminds me of someone...

Enjoy the beautiful spring weekend, everyone!

And Now, Scenes from a Foggy Summer Solstice...

photo by Nancy Marstaller

photo by Nancy Marstaller

We had our soggy Summer Solstice celebration last Sunday, and on Wednesday night this week my Women's Meditation Group had a foggy Summer Solstice gathering. We are having that sort of June here in Maine. Mostly wet and cool.

Women's Meditation meets at The Stonehouse Manor in Phippsburg each June for good eats and a traditional sunset walk on Popham Beach. I have pictures from years past in which we are all smiling and sunlit, standing around sand castles that were built by happy children during the day. This year the beach at twilight looked like something out of a science fiction movie, strewn with whole tree trunks, big torn branches, and hills of seaweed washed ashore during the epic high tides we experienced this week due to strong winds and the new moon. This created a beautifully eerie and mysterious landscape.

As you can see, we enjoyed ourselves. There is something especially peaceful, playful, and powerful about this particular group of women, and I am grateful for their friendship!

Whatever the weather, I hope that you are all enjoying this first week of summer! Have a relaxing weekend!