For years, an entire art journal took me about three months to complete. But over these last six months, I have finished exactly one art journal spread, and for good reason: in July, we welcomed our first child to the world.
She is an absolute delight, grinning gummily at the cat, developing skills literally overnight, shrieking like a pterodactyl. We spend our days nursing and reading and napping and bouncing and rocking and observing the world. My little dandelion puff baby, she is an incredibly light sleeper, disturbed by the slightest movement, stirred at the slightest sound. Everyone says that parenthood is all-consuming, but even with years of experience with kids, I underestimated how true that really is. I’ve never been so tired.
But slowly, slowly, I am coming out of the infant fog and some days baby girl is even napping longer than 40 minutes by herself, and today, for the first time, I sat down to create several art journal spreads. It felt so good.
I’ve always sought to recreate the looseness of children’s art in my own work: kids create free of expectation, fully absorbed in the process — the tools, the way they glide across paper — rather than the outcome. It’s why I’m drawn to artists like Cy Twombly and Joan Mitchell. But this time, I channeled my daughter.
A few weeks ago, she explored tempera paint sticks and made her own first marks on paper (with lots of support from yours truly). It’s a continuous challenge to intentionally create something random, but emulating an actual kid, rather than how I think kids would create, is new. I am so excited for all the art-making to come.
