The Backstory.

I devoted my life to making art exclusively for 26 years. Worked almost full-time while earning a BFA and an MFA. Amassed student loans that took me 20 years to pay off, worked shitty jobs to feed my habit, and wrecked my body through the abuse of obsessive art making.

(carpal tunnel operation scar)

For 26 years, making art was the driving force in my life, to the exclusion of all else. I ate pasta to save money for supplies, shopped at thrift stores for all my clothes & furniture, put myself in debt again and again to buy supplies, ship work, and send out packets. I have pushed my body to the brink again and again through sleep deprivation to finish an important project for a big show.

When I chose a life companion, one of the most important criteria was his complete understanding of the role art plays in my life: I simply have to make it, or I will self destruct.

Because art (and my work in particular) is about life experiences, and being human, after careful consideration, I made the decision to have a child. I did not want to miss out on the biggest, most expansive life experience one could have. It was the right decision, it turns out.

Being an academic, I did my research on artists who are also mothers. No one, it turns out, writes books about "artists who are also fathers", because no one cares... no conflict there, no threat to the work. I recall being livid when the New York Times Magazine featured an otherwise wonderful profile of artist Marlene Dumas, and chose to include a somewhat indicting few paragraphs about her relationship with her daughter:

Is Helena (Marlene's daughter) interested in art? “ No,” Dumas replied without regret. “She wants to work with the psychology of children.” (AH HA!)

Dumas returned to the table, and we resumed our conversation, only to have Helena approach a few minutes later. “I’m sorry,” she told her mother. “I don’t want to interrupt, but we had a date.” She said she wanted to go shopping for a watch for her birthday, which was three weeks away.

“Not now, Helena, not now,” Dumas said with a hint of impatience, adding that she was in her studio until 3 the previous night and wasn’t feeling up to a shopping expedition. Then she turned to me and said: “Every time she has a birthday — she still has that from childhood — she gets so into the birthday it overrides everything else. Whatever it is, if it’s a cat, if it’s a watch — can we please not think of that now?” (because I'm being interviewed by THE NEW YORK TIMES, and I have no wife to keep you out of the studio during my interview)

“I just like the window-shopping,” Helena said, and there was something touching about her persistence. The watch seemed as good a symbol as any for the predicament of a child who wanted more of her mother’s time.

After a while, they stopped speaking English and switched into Dutch, and their tone grew more strident. Unable to make out what they were saying beyond the “ja”s and the “nee”s and the bursts of guttural, throat-clearing sounds, I wandered off to look around the studio.

In all my years of reading art articles, I have never even heard mention of a male artist's children... does Damien Hirst even HAVE children? How about Jeff Koons?

Many famous, iconic male artists spent a great number of their waking hours chasing women and/or getting drunk, life experiences that occupied every bit as much time and energy as raising a child with a strong support system. Why is a male artist with children "well rounded" or even "potent", while female artists with children are dismissed?

Jerry Saltz recently began a Facebook discussion with his thousands of artist friends about art making and motherhood that confirmed many of my suspicions. One prominent (female) gallerist noted that "every time one of my female artists gets pregnant, their work changes". No kidding. I wonder if we would trust an artist who, say, had an earth-shaking near-death experience, if it never showed up in his art?

So, now I am a mother. My heart has been blown wide open. As I suspected, every emotion that I experience has deepened. And it has already changed my art. Some of my current work has motherhood as an impetus, some of it does not. Because it is a big part of me, but not all of me. So I will do my job like I have always done, and make the most powerful work I am capable of making. I'll throw it out into the world and see if the world is ready, and with this blog, applaud others who have the courage to do the same...