Birth Paintings

Birthdance

Birth Paintings 1986-1989

direct link to album on Picasa: Birth Paintings

Birth Paintings, 1987-1989
Except for one painting, which I sold to friends in 1989, I have resisted selling any of these paintings.
They are a series, a visual journal. They are for sale only as a group.

birthdance

direct link to YouTube (a video of the paintings above and a slideshow and the poem below): Birthdance

On the writing of BIRTHDANCE

Birthdance took two years to write. In 1987, after my first child, my son, was born, I tried to write about birth. At the time, I was unable to find any poetry or literature by women on what giving birth 'felt' like, on their inner birthing experience, and I wasn't sure how to express those powerful birthing hours. It took some years, and many revisions as I worked towards how to express this powerful moment of my life, and finally chose to allow the stages of labour to structure the poem. Each woman has a different experience of birth, the many stories, poems and artwork by women in the last decade or two have been an important sharing of what was previously hidden.

Embedded below is the poem in its entirety.

BIRTHDANCE
a birth poem

written when the

birth paintings were being painted

"I am heavy with ripeness. My body is a fruit opening,

releasing its nourished, protected seed. I am splitting,

stretching, gaping. I am sweet with birth. I am succulent.

I am a dying flower streaked with blood. "(from the poem)

(if the document isn't opening, the poem is here: Birthdance)

From Brenda Clews, Birth Paintings 1987-1989

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 the poster for their 10th Anniversay Issue features another of my birth paintings, "Dawn."]

Notebook of the Maternal Body

If the document is not opening, The Notebook of the Maternal Body is here

Mother of Milk

The video is hosted at YouTube,
where you can see it in larger size.

Mother of Milk, 2003

Mother of Milk, 2003 from Brenda Clews on YouTube.

I recorded this reading of "Mother of Milk" in my studio in Vancouver for ARM's 'Mothering, Religion and Spirituality' Conference.

Breastfeeding my two children until they weaned themselves, a total of five years, I went from filling my time with constant doing, a consumption of time, activities, ideas, to being able to be with the vast silence of the interior stillness. In this learning of a deeper rhythm which seemingly encompassed the discordant ambiguities, difficulties, discontinuities, traumas, and irreconcilable aspects, as well as the joys and unities, of my life my spiritual understandings and practices underwent a profound metamorphosis. While I would emphasize that there are many spiritual paths, and that all are equally valid, the particular path I found myself on arose directly out of my experiences as a mother-of-milk as I subsequently explored the concept of the ‘Divine Mother’ in ancient mythologies and modern religions, through meditation in a yoga tradition, and privately before my small alter at home, so that, while still emphatically a ‘woman in process,’ my experience of a feminist, goddess-oriented, empowering way of being could be be described as an ‘embodied spirituality.’

Videotaped in Vancouver in 2003, remastered in 2011
Copyright 2003 by Brenda Clews

______

This was a personal essay, or perhaps prosepoem of a certain point of motherhood, and I recorded it in my studio in Vancouver (where I lived at the time) for a conference on "Motherhood and Spirituality" in 2003 in Toronto. The viewing was well received. Afterwards the DVD went underground, and was in at least one art show, in 2004, at the Ayer Lofts Art Gallery in Massachusetts where it was one of the features of a video evening. The prestigious Mothers Movement Online published it as an essay around that time too, and it's still online.

How Can We Be Different & the Same?
A talk culled from my work on the maternal body, prepared and videoed in 2004,
presented at an ARM conference at York University in 2006.

This was my last contribution to the field of maternal studies.
In 2010 I edited the video, adding sepia tones, layering images.

How Can We Be Different & the Same?

The video is hosted at Vimeo
where you can see it in larger size.

Brenda Clews

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