A Mother's Meltdown Painting

I’m a wife and mother of five wonderful children. I have lived in the city, married and moved to a tree farm with my husband and now reside on a beautiful lake in Ontario Canada. These life experiences have enriched my life perceptions immensely but my real journey didn’t start here. My life journey began in Belgium. Shortly after we moved to Italy and from there the family settled in Toronto Canada. By today’s standards my childhood would be considered “deprived”. This however is far from the truth. My family of eight had plenty of food on the table. With imagination, creativity and a very strong work ethic, our success was inevitable in our new and welcoming country Canada. As children we didn’t have lots of material things. Toys were few but the “medium” available in our backyard was put to good use. We created regal crowns with the dandelions. The abandoned cardboard boxes became cities complete with houses, schools and hospitals. As children, we ruled our newly created kingdom with pride and joy. To this day every member of my family is highly creative and we all dabble in art. I prefer the magic of oil paint! We weren’t a “game-board” type family. Family and friends would gather for meals and healthy debates. Any topic under the sun was fair game...politics, religion, culture... science. We always felt safe to express personal opinions in this heated but stimulating environment. Eventually my feelings and emotions stemming from these past and present debates and other life experiences began to underscore most of my art work. Life is about action and reaction to our emotional and physical world. I believe that everything in a painting is symbolic; the choice of colour, the subject, the setting, the brushstrokes all give homage to what is the core of what makes us human. It is this litany of human emotions that we recognize and our ability to share this with each other, be it through literature, music or art that makes us human. It is in fact the “essence” of the human spirit. I will not be swayed to embrace a particular style, or what is deemed “current”. Great art transcends the dictates of time and stirs within us those emotions that define the human spirit regardless the “style” and medium used. I can only paint when something or someone awakens that need in me to put to canvas feelings or memories that have been awakened.