When you choose to make art for your life, it does bring with it a fair amount of self reflection. As in, why do I keep doing this thing that makes no money and no one seems to need? And then I think about my mother, who was also a visual artist, and who was so good at making me feel it was important work. She died over a year ago and I’m still grappling with who she was and the meaning of her life. When she died, it was summer and the crickets were just starting to come out. There was a huge one, with green legs and a brown body, we discovered in the house one day. It was perched on a curtain and we kept seeing it for almost two weeks after my mom died.
There’s a story about my parents that my mom used to tell me. My dad never approved of my mother’s vagabond ways- she liked to roam and enjoy life to its fullest. He told her once that she was like the grasshopper in the story of the ant and the grasshopper. While she laughed and sang, he was, of course, the ant, working diligently all through the summer so that there would be enough to eat through the winter. The fable does cast a negative light on the grasshopper who as soon as it gets cold, comes knocking on the ants door and is refused entry by the ant. The ant says, ‘if you sang all summer, then you can sing all winter too,” and shuts the door. That’s one cold hearted ant. I read another version of this story, years later, in a picture book. In the new version, when winter comes the grasshopper is welcomed into the home of the ant because he brings song and light and the beauty that is so sorely needed to endure long winters. To me, it’s always been a metaphor for art. There are those who see it as frivolous, and unnecessary. In a society that sees money as the marker of success, artists can seem like the grasshoppers- singing, dancing, but not making any ‘real value’.
This painting is in honor of my mom. It’s partly a self portrait but also not. The woman in the painting is a version of me, one who is mourning, with partly shaved head, looking into the twinkling light of her mother’s love. She wears a kind of armor but it’s green as is her skirt. Green like the grasshopper that perches on her leg. My mother always protected me from the violence of the world, in ways she hadn’t been. She was my armor for much of my life, and even when she wasn’t there I could feel her protection around me. She defended my right to be an artist, to make beauty and express myself. She understood that without art, our hearts will shrivel and harden. The ants need us more than they realize.
The Grasshopper, oil on canvas