I think I blogged about my 15 portraits in 15 weeks challenge a few weeks ago here. As I come upon the last week of the challenge, I’m a little tired of doing portraits but I’m quite grateful to the project for helping me solve the retiree’s dilemma of too much free time. For the last week of the challenge, tired of doing mostly fairly standard portraits, I decided to paint my youngest granddaughter as Goldilocks. For the record, she is exactly the type who could sneak into someone’s house, wreak all kinds of havoc, then fall asleep looking like a little angel. Side note: when I went on the spirit journey with some grandkids, that I previously blogged about here, it turned out that my spirit animal was a bear, so I had been wanting to paint one of them too!
My first Frieda Kahlo inspired painting was about a decade ago when I found a cute little Mexican dress at the thrift store, so I posed and painted my little granddaughter as baby Frieda. More recently I caught my daughter wearing flowers in her hair and it inspired me to pose her for a Frieda inspired portrait. We couldn’t find any monkeys, but I thought her little dog Pumpernickel could fill that role. Why is it that Frieda is so iconic in art? It seems to me that suggesting Frieda is a good way to represent women’s inner strength and a certain amount of staying true to yourself. Both portraits are below.
I read an Iris Murdoch novel recently where the retired protagonist was described as existing in the ‘relaxed banality of a life without goals’. I was definitely feeling like that after my retirement, so I started to pick up various challenges presented by social media. Some weeks ago there was ‘Inktober’, where you draw something in ink every day, according to various prompts, for the month of October and then post it. That was fun and somewhat challenging, but, guess what, October ended as it always does, on October 31. So, after that what I found to do was the #15weekportrait challenge hosted on Instagram by artist @ajalper. It’s just like it sounds – you paint a portrait a week for 15 weeks, posting it on Instagram with appropriate hashtags, and hopefully you improve your skills as you go along. That has brought me to week seven, almost the halfway mark, and a portrait of my Mom that I thought I wouldn’t let go by without a blog post.
I had painted my Mom several times, but never my ‘young’ Mom, the way she looked when I first met her back in the 1950’s. So, painting her this way was a little like looking at her through my baby eyes many, many years after the fact! She was quite an influence and taught us to be honest (see my brother’s post on how honest he is), industrious (that’s why I like having goals, I guess) and creative. We lost her five years ago now and she is the first person, that, when she died, I had the distinct feeling that she wasn’t dead at all. I could see her face in every flower and still feel her in the elements, and certainly she has gone on living in her descendants.
7 weeks of Portrait challenge subjects from the upper corner down and across: My friend’s granddaughter, my niece, granddaughter #2, granddaughter #5, granddaughter #4, the hub, and Mom.
From the www.spiritanimal.info site: “The owl spirit animal
is emblematic of a deep connection with wisdom and intuitive knowledge. If you
have the owl as totem or power animal, you’re likely to have the ability
to see what’s usually hidden to most. When the spirit of this animal guides
you, you can see the true reality, beyond illusion and deceit. The owl also
offers for those who have it a personal totem the inspiration and guidance
necessary to deeply explore the unknown and the magic of life.”
I don’t know if everyone has an animal totem but I
always thought my daughter Piri did. I feel sure that her animal totem is an
owl because when she was a baby, a particular barred owl living in our woods,
got obsessed with her and seemed to be constantly watching her. He would even
perch on a low branch outside the living room window so he could stare into the
house when we were not outside. At night he perched on the hip of the roof and
made those wheezing owl noises that are not hoots. When she was pre-school age
her favorite dress, that she insisted on wearing almost every day, had an owl
on it.
So when I painted Piri, I wanted to include her animal totem. -LP
