The Living Artist

“Love” by Heather Keith Freeman
8.85″”x11.75″, pen and ink on watercolor paper

Image description: Two women embrace against a rainbow background.

On June 24th, 2011, along with thousands of other people all over the United States, I sat glued to the live video feed of the New York State Senate as they finally voted to pass marriage equality for same-sex couples. The sixth and largest state to do so, New York joins the ranks of those who recognize that marriage has its basis in love, not a magic combination of genitalia.

I tried in this image to communicate that love, steering clear of the common representation of woman-to-woman affection as something performed for the male gaze. These are two women deeply in love, and if they live in New York, one small step closer to having their relationship recognized as equal to any heterosexual one.

I am a woman married to a man, and I declare that my marriage shall be worth more on the day that marriage rights are extended to everyone, not less.

There’s a long, long way to go yet. Not just marriage rights, but employment and housing non-discrimination, proper support and assistance for GLBT youth who have been kicked out of their homes, and the elimination of the shocking murder rate of trans people, just for a start.

My right to live as myself does not take away from your right to be a bigoted asshole. Hmm – that could make a good bumper sticker for my Zazzle store.

Movements #4 by Heather Keith Freeman
4″x6″, pen and ink on watercolor paper

Image description: A nude woman throws her head back in graceful movement against a background of mellifluous green.

Here’s the fourth in my Movements series, a set of small-scale portraits of women experiencing the joy of dynamic embodiment.

I began this as an experiment with pen color, to see what effects I could get with a brown pen instead of a black one. Matching shades for the shadows was so difficult, though, that almost all of it ended up black again. There might be a bit here and there that’s still brown, but you’d have to look pretty close to tell.

Any frustration from that, though, is mitigated by that background. Oh, that green just turned out so, so beautifully! It gives me happy artist shivers :)

Half the Sky by Heather Keith Freeman
14″x17″, pen and ink on watercolor paper

So I have no idea how to tell this story without it seeming like bragging, but it’s touched me deeply and I’d like to write about it.

Pittsburgh’s Three Rivers Arts Festival started last Friday. It snarled up mass transit downtown, so my husband took a cab home. The driver, a friendly black woman, was chatting with him about the festival, and said that she was kind of interested in going but that the kind of art that gets shown is so mainstream and white.

Andrei pulled out Half the Sky to show her, told her a little about it and why I am actively working to show people of color in my artwork.

She was, by my husband’s account, impressed and pleased, and happy to know that there were artists out there who “got it.”

And I’m validated in ways I can’t even describe to know that a black woman has seen what I’m trying to do and appreciates it.

Movements #3 by Heather Keith Freeman
4″x6″, pen and ink on watercolor paper

Here’s the third in my Movements series, a set of small-scale portraits of women experiencing the joy of dynamic embodiment.

I had to completely redo this one. About 90% of the way through I masked the figure to do some color wash on the background, and when I peeled up the mask the top layer of paper came with it.

*head*desk*

Not sure why that happened, as I still don’t have much experience with masking fluid. Best guess is I laid it on too thick, and/or waited too long before peeling it back up (if an hour is too long?!). Anyway, I redid it after much grumbling, which of course took twice as long and didn’t turn out quite as well, but it’s alright.

Working on a couple of other bigger paintings now, so this series will probably take a brief hiatus until my to-do list is a little shorter.

Movements #1 by Heather Keith Freeman
4″x6″, pen and ink on watercolor paper

It’s been about a month since I’ve put any new artwork up. I’m working on about four different larger-scale pieces which are going very slowly. My frustration at not finishing anything was mounting, so I’ve started doing some smaller-scale studies in parallel, just so I can keep finishing things.

I don’t often do series – I usually lose interest and focus about midway through the second one – but the theme of this is loose enough I’ll give it another try. “Movements” portrays women experiencing the joy of dynamic embodiment, with an emphasis on showing those whose existence as dancers are usually erased by mainstream portrayals. I will also show a sense of the women enjoying movement for their own sake, not for the titillation of another’s gaze.

In this first one, the primary transgression against the mainstream dancer portrayal is the black woman’s natural hair. While there are black ballerinas, they are usually relatively light-skinned and present with a very White beauty aesthetic.

I actually finished this one a couple of weeks ago, but because it’s so tiny I promptly lost it until just a few days ago. Whoops.

Looking Forward by Heather Keith Freeman
9″x12″, pen and ink on vellum

Riding high off of the energy from painting The Morrigan, I wanted to plunge right into the next project, but needed something simple this time. Since my back was complaining at me from all of the brushwork I’d been doing, I also needed something I could do primarily in pen. So, a simple portrait; also taking advantage of the opportunity to expand my experience drawing nonwhite ethnicities by painting a woman of South Asian heritage.

I’m also working on expanding my repertoire of facial expressions. Smiles in general are very hard to make static portraits of without making them look like forced grimaces.

 

 

Some of us over at the Goddess Circle have been going through The Artist’s Way the last few weeks. It’s basically a 12-week course to unblock your creativity. You’d think a professional artist like me wouldn’t need that, right?

Wrong. While I am pretty creatively free in some ways, I am very very blocked in others. One of those blocked ways is writing. Another is sketching. Anything raw and loose or unrefined gets tangled up in performance anxiety and perfectionism. It’s not pretty.

Anyway, one of the core practices of The Artist’s Way is to write three pages every morning, of whatever comes into your head. You don’t read the pages, you don’t plan for them to mean anything, you’re just clearing out the cobwebs and the dreamsludge and making a clear space in your head for your ideas to bubble forth. I do them on 750words.com, to save my hand from RSI. I get up at 6:30, 30 minutes before my family wakes, and slip downstairs in the dark and quiet to wrap myself in a snuggie with my laptop and Red Bull.

This practice can be pretty painful at first. Barely awake, cold, stiff, cranky. Words splurt out in short, viscous chunks, a phrase here, a phrase there. Sometimes just one word, over and over. Gradually, unevenly, things ease. A full sentence emerges. An interesting idea bubbles forth – or maybe it doesn’t. It doesn’t matter. Clearing space, creating sacred space in your mind.

After about ten days of this, it suddenly got easier. I realized I was looking forward to those few cold and quiet minutes before the dawn, that they anchored my entire day. And the words started to flow more easily, with a velvet frisson of pleasure not unlike the brilliant colors flowing from my paintbrush at other times of day.

The Writer by Heather Keith Freeman
9″x12″, pen and ink on watercolor paper

That’s how this piece was born. The first version of phrase issuing from her fingertips came to me that tenth day of morning pages: “the words stream sweet and soft and slippery like silk from my fingers.”

Image description: A woman sculpted out of black and white gestures gracefully on a background of swirling blue and green. Words flow from her fingers, through the air, and around the curls of her snakelike hair.

The phrases written into this piece are pretty hard to decipher even in the original, but they read:

• words that stream sweet and soft and slippery as silk from my fingers soul sundering wonder and shivering power, silvery flower of my self unfurled
• bold words that thunder through snow and shatter iron
• twisted words that tangle and strip and wither thoughts before they even begin
• tiny words still flow like water droplets from icicle tips in the raw chill of spring melt
• shadow words half-felt fading like dreams
• words that scramble into gibberish when I look to close clawing themselves to pieces like spiders if spisljlkjgahr glajhgakjelag
• ideas blowing over and through my brain like Medusa’s tentacles striving for air strangling for room to breathe and thrive and grow and be seen

This piece makes me happy, and I’m happy with it (two very different things). I’m going through a very rough patch personally, so I’m glad to have had this to carry me through it. It’s very difficult to drown in despair while I’m painting!

Prints and cards of this piece are available through RedBubble.

Back in the infancy of this blog, I did a post on the #1 question that creative types always get, namely “where do you get your ideas?” Now I’m visiting the topic again, this time in visual form, addressing what that moment looks like when an idea congeals into an image in my head.

Birth of an Idea by Heather Keith Freeman
11×15″, pen and ink on watercolor paper

The idea may come from anywhere, but it’s channeled through my throat and third-eye chakras (having to do with communication and intuition, respectively), swirling out of me and coalescing into a vortex of… there – there it is. My breath catches – my eyes widen. I feel uplifted, hopeful, excited, energized.

It looks like this.

This is a true self-portrait, meant not only to represent my energetic self but actually to resemble my features, something I’ve tried many times but never succeeded in before. According to my husband, the resemblance is “spooky”, so I’m guessing I did okay! I wear glasses, normally, but other than that this is me. (Compare to the actual photograph on my ‘About’ page.)

Technical Notes:

I’ve talked before about how racist typical art education is; all the models, all the how-tos and anatomy lessons, are based almost exclusively on white models. Happily this seems to be improving in recent years, if only as judged by the diversity of the models in artist’s reference books; but when I was learning human anatomy, Ruby’s The Human Figure: A Photographic Reference for Artists was where it was at, and that was all white except for a headshot or two in the back section.

Anyway, I’ve been concentrating on representing people of color in my work over the last year, with a fair bit of success. I didn’t think this would come up when I ventured into self-portrait territory, because obviously I’m pretty damned white. However, I do have about 1/16 Native American blood, if family legend is to be believed, and I realized for the first time when doing this piece that I don’t have Caucasian eyes. Caucasian eyes are, simplistically speaking, ovals. Mine are trapezoidal teardrops, with a very flat bottom line, a subtle difference that turned out to make all the difference when it came to making a face actually look like me.

This piece was directly inspired by an essay by Arwyn at Raising My Boychick: My Parenting Style Did Not Make My Motherhood a Prison, My Society Did. I strongly encourage you to go read the whole thing.

Motherhood by Heather Keith Freeman
9.5″x13″, pen and ink on watercolor paper

The experience of motherhood in this culture can feel very much like a prison. You are walled in by countless layers of conflicting, judgemental statements and criticized for almost any choice you make; much like the experience of being a woman, but with the added pressure of your child’s welfare at stake. Lack of societal support for mothers isolates us within our own homes or a narrow subset of public places, always with eyes upon us less our children act like, you know, children. The least expression of unhappiness or attempt to have a life separate from the child is widely framed as selfishness and irreparably damaging to the child. And yet if we dare speak out about the dehumanization of this experience, we are flooded with guilt trips and still more judgement, because, you know, we chose to have children, so should rejoice in every single aspect of anything associated with it, right?

I call bullshit.

Just as a woman’s body is not public property, neither is her motherhood. The choice to have a child (if, indeed, she had that choice; far too many women do not) does not give free license to criticize, judge, berate, expose, and pick apart every aspect of her experience or every decision she makes regarding it. Provide information and support if you want to, but not judgement.

As is common with my text/figure pieces (such as NOT YOURS and A Thousand Cuts, the existence of a given statement within it does not necessarily mean that I agree or disagree with it, or even that it is never (or always) appropriate to make such a statement. In this piece, each statement contributes to the overall oppressive environment, but is not necessarily in itself problematic. With regards to direct action, this piece calls for more thoughtfulness when it comes to statements like these, which we often make or think without much analysis of the biases or privilege behind them.

Artwork description and transcript:
A woman stands holding a baby, a fearful look on her face. Behind her is a wall of judgemental, conflicting statements about motherhood.

The wall reads:
The world is more dangerous today than it was when we were children.
You can’t keep them dependent on you forever.
Aren’t you worried about him?
How could you go back to work so soon?
I don’t know how you stay sane at home with her all day.
You should take some time for yourself.
A good mother sacrifices everything for her children.
Co-sleeping is so dangerous.
Babies need to sleep with their mothers.
You’re letting him walk all over you.
A child needs security.
It’s not healthy to be so entwined with your child.
Aren’t you worried that she’s not crawling yet?
You should get that checked out.
My friend’s kid crawled late, and it turned out he had autism.
Aren’t you concerned she might inherit your mental issues?
It’s selfish to have children if you’re not completely stable.
Are you watching your diet?
Have you taken infant CPR?
My parents let me do that and I turned out okay.
He has to learn to soothe himself.
Making her cry it out is cruel.
A child just needs to know he’s loved.
She needs consistency and firm boundaries.
Don’t let him see you get upset.
You are still breastfeeding, right?
How can you still be breastfeeding?
Formula is just as good.
Formula kills babies.
Can’t you keep her quiet?
Just get a babysitter.
How come we never see you anymore?
You chose to have children.
You should be grateful; some people can’t have kids.
Do you know all the chemicals they put in that?
Don’t you know that company is evil?
My cousin’s kid had that vaccine and got really sick.
What do you mean he’s not vaccinated?
You just need to relax.
You worry too much.
You’re projecting your issues on to your kids.
Are you saving for her college yet?
He’s got to learn someday.
Words like these, not my child, make motherhood a prison.

New art! Going up late on a Friday when nobody’s around to see it! (That’s what y’all get for not adding me to your RSS feeds…. ;)

Firedancer by Heather Keith Freeman
12″x9″, pen and ink on watercolor paper

Image description: A woman, sketched in black and white outline on a yellow background, flourishes her arms. Swirls of fire stream from her fingers, swooping around her head.

I actually did this one before finishing Plaything yesterday, but I wasn’t sure if I wanted to flesh out the dancer’s body at all or leave it in outline. I decided the contrast worked pretty well as is.

This was also what came out after a major creative frustration – another piece I was working on that I just. couldn’t. get. right. I tweeted about my frustration and was wisely advised to put it away before I damaged it or myself ;). But that left me with nowhere to put the energy I’d been building, which of course put me in a rotten mood, until I just drew something, *anything*, to get it out of my head, and what came out happened to be something I like a whole lot!

Between this and Plaything, I almost feel like I’ve got a touch of my pre-accident style back. I can’t do this regularly – it kills my back, even in small scale – but it makes me so happy that I can do any of it at all.