Moved to a new website, with
a slideshow of all the birth paintings -
Art & Writings of Brenda Clews/Birth Paintings
The BIRTH PAINTING SERIES consists of 16 watercolour paintings on paper, and one acrylic painting on canvas, 1986-1988. (Click
on image to see larger size.)
*This 13" x 20" art print is for sale. It's printed on high quality satin finish photo paper. For ordering,
please email me, see link below. $40.00 (CAN or US) shipping & handling extra.
Thank you.
THE BODY IS FOR BLOSSOMING
...pigment of flesh flowing under my fingers, magenta, alizarin crimson, cerulean blue, cyan green, cadmium yellow, dark violet,
colour so rich it's almost edible, bodyscapes of colour, landscapes of fertility, erupting in the swirl of water and paint...
When I was pregnant, my body changed in fundamental and drastic ways. It was a crisis: the freedom of an old self was dying
to make way for the mother I would become.
The "Birth Series" paintings became a visual journey of my changing body, a way to comprehend what I was undergoing in the
tumble of hormones as my belly grew. The paintings focus on the woman who conceives and carries a baby into life, who nourishes
and awaits the child who will hopefully emerge from the nine-month gestation of her body like a dream become real.
In reaction to an increasing invisibility in the world: the averted gaze, perhaps arising out of a cultural discomfort with
the swollen belly, I wished to present the pregnant body as sensual and sacred. Despite my desire to confound the categories
of alluring woman and maternal body, I found myself deep in the mystery of creation itself.
At the beginning of the series, the body is portrayed clearly; as the forces of labour, birth and then breastfeeding unfold,
the clarity shifts into flowing colours suggesting the transformative experience that carrying and delivering and breastfeeding
a baby is.
These paintings are about a rite of passage, about the strangest body on earth, about the mind-blowing transformation of skin,
belly, heart and perception of the self, as a woman ripens and delivers her fragile and beautiful fruit, the newborn, a miracle
of the world.
_______________
A version of this piece was published as an artist's statement in "Mothering, Popular Culture and the Arts," Journal of the
Association for Research on Mothering (ARM), Spring/Summer 2003, Vol 5, No 1, p.198, and where the painting in the upper left hand corner, "Bloom," 13.25" x 9", watercolour
on paper, 1986, was the cover.
[Also about half way down the ARM homepage is a link where you can view the poster for their Anniversay Issue, which features another of my birth paintings,
"Dawn."]
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