Small and Mighty: The Nights and Days of an Artist/Mother
Artist statement:
Many nights, my daughter and I draw together. I draw shapes for us to both color in. She usually cuts hers out carefully after she’s done coloring, and often hangs them around the house. I enjoy the companionship of sitting in silence with my child, enjoy the relaxation of coloring together.
As part of our shape-drawing, I landed on a shape I couldn’t let go of, basically a C-shape with an oval in the opening somewhere. After many repetitions, I started to realize the maternal nature of this shape: when my daughter was an infant, I slept like this with her in my bed, me as the C, her as the oval, nursing throughout the night and listening to each other breathe. After my wife died when our daughter was 11 weeks old, these nights became even more brutal and more nurturing, a key to survival for both of us.
Four and half years later, I miss those nights with an ache in my heart. There is a deep and abiding joy in the memories of our early nights, a feeling that was not always present in their actual lived existence.
Here, I express that ache and that joy in this shape that repeats again and again in lightness and simplicity. This shape, these colors and textures are nothing more and nothing less, nothing heavy and nothing light. They are love and sleep and nurture and care.
Jill Samuels