How Motherhood Transformed My Vocation as an Artist

Welcome to our Symposium on Motherhood and Creativity - More Organic Than It May Appear. We are stunned by the quality of pieces we’ve been able to curate from mothers who are are writers and artists, and are very pleased to be able to host this conversation.

The conversation first appears in the print magazine, with pieces from Suzanne M. Wolfe, Shemaiah Gonzalez, Lindsay Younce Tsohantaridis, and Jody Collins.

The Christ Child at Play with St. Joseph, oil on panel, 48" diameter, 2020

I am not sure if being an artist has made me a better mother, but I am certain that becoming a mother has made me a better artist.

The transition to motherhood is exhausting and humbling for every woman; it presents particular challenges for an artist. Some artists stop making art entirely when they have children. Instead, they apply their creative impulses to the creation of ephemera for their children: birthday cakes, costumes, decorating the home for the liturgical year—all beautiful things that are essentially worthless on the professional art market and yet priceless and irreplaceable to the children who experience them. Their artistic vocations are subsumed into their vocations as mothers.

In my own life, I only experienced success as a professional artist after I started having children. It has been a strange twist of Providence, but the irony is not lost on me.

When I was single, I had half-finished projects in every room of the house in which I lived alone. I would try to dispel the boredom and quiet by wandering from the piano in my living room to the canvas in my dining room and then to the knitting in my bedroom. Occasionally, I would experience a wonderful artistic flow beginning late in the evening and then work until I felt like stopping. I made many attempts to find commissions but never seemed to gain much traction.

After I got married, things began to change. I couldn’t sprinkle art supplies though every room. I couldn’t just skip meals if painting happened be more interesting than food. Being pregnant made sleep more appealing than most other activities.

Now that I have children, I realize that my creative alone time is exactly proportional to the amount of creative alone time sacrificed by my husband. Most of my art supplies are poisonous, fragile, or choking hazards and must be kept far from our living space. In the evenings, I am so worn out that I can’t create anything after the children go to bed. It is only because time is now such a commodity that my husband and I decided that a family art business was worth the sacrifice of material goods and financial stability in exchange for time for our family to be together, time for us to educate our children, and time for our own creative work.

There are still only twenty-four hours in the day and many of them are spent cleaning up spills, changing diapers, and making the next meal—which may or may not be eaten by our three small children. Yet strangely, I am now producing more work and better work than I ever did when I was single. How is this possible? I can only ascribe it to a number of hidden gifts which accompanied the gift of motherhood.

Focus

Three children under age five produce a constant polyphony of needs. It is not possible to make a batch of muffins, let alone put together a thought, without a number of overlapping interruptions – some of them punctuated by blood-curdling screams. I find that the effect of this environment of constant interruption turns the hours I have in the studio into extraordinary periods of focus where I am able to channel all the creative wisps of thought I had throughout the day into short bursts of productivity. Because I work for such brief periods of time, I am always at my best and don’t experience creative burnout.

St. Peter Damian, oil on canvas, 32 x 40", 2020

Patience

Looking back to my earlier work, my overarching technical defect was rooted in a moral defect. I would work hastily and lazily and settle for “good enough.” As a mother, one is forced to suppress any inner restlessness when called upon to nurse for hours or to soothe a sleepless toddler. One is forced to plan ahead, to finish one’s chores, to wait for a child to learn a new skill. I still find that slowing down during the creative process is unpleasant, but now I am at least capable of doing so. This allows me to get to a much finer level of finish than I ever reached in my youth.

Humility

Making art used to be my first (earthly) priority. Now, the well-being and formation of my children is far more important. When my children behave badly in public, I feel frustrated by their behavior but also a bit humiliated by its reflection upon my parenting. Each child seems to whittle down my pride further and further. It is only through countless experiences that I have a better realization of my own ignorance in the fine art of parenting.

The knowledge that God will judge me as a wife and mother first and as an artist second provides the detachment necessary to assess the weak areas of my work. If St. Thomas Aquinas can say, “All that I have written seems like straw” what can I really say about my own paintings? They are nothing compared to the supernatural realities to which they point. Only God can move the soul of a viewer and only God can bestow artistic skill and permit the conditions under which it can develop. When my works (or my children) are criticized, it stings of course, but the criticism is often justified and can drive me to try harder as well as maintain an honest estimation of myself. When pride stops up one’s ears, growth is impossible.

Abandonment

Each child is created with a particular personality. As a parent, one can only hope to guide one’s child in the right direction and pray for the grace to do so well. Likewise, the creative process evades control. As an artist, one must acknowledge the role that inspiration and accident play in the success of a particular work. Good artists and good parents only exist by God’s grace and their cooperation with it.

St. Edmund Campion, oil on canvas, 30 x 40", 2020

Love

After my first child was born, my ash-colored body was draped on the couch for weeks. A trip across the room would leave me winded. Every bride imagines the lengths that her husband would go to for her but only the wife and mother knows what lengths he has gone to. From my vantage point on the couch, I watched my husband do all the laundry, all the cooking, and everything else, without complaint. It was only because God had taken all of my strength that I was able to experience what it means to completely trust another person for all my needs.

Likewise, I would not be able to take on any work of art confidently without my husband’s trust in me. The knowledge that he trusts me to mother our children and trusts me to make paintings that can support our family helps me to ignore inner voices of self-doubt and provides a level of drive that looks beyond a particular painting. St. Paul says that husbands should love their wives and that women should obey their husbands. What a joy to obey when he orders you to fulfill your vocation as an artist! Can such a command be returned with anything but love?

I meet many women who are frustrated by their lack of art-making after they become mothers. When I listen more closely, the situation is often that either they or their husbands do not see art as an essential activity, let alone a calling. Beauty and children both call for sacrifice. If we lay the sacrifices of time, money, and pride before God, he will return these sacrifices to us and to our spouses in the form of gifts. I can say from experience that it is difficult to discern at times which sacrifices are for children and which are for art. Happily, I can also report that the blessings are just as difficult to distinguish.