Children's Art 3: My art after Maeve ctd

 The second major piece of work I did with Raquel was about 8 months after Maeve died. Having returned to my halftime work in the emergency dept at 2 months, relatively successfully, I had subsequently taken a month off to paint half the house with my husband, during which time I also wrote poetry and spent some time on Stradbroke Island. It was a very reflective time and after this time, returning to work was more difficult, not for the reasons people expected (confronting trauma) but because I was struggling with the meaning of what I was doing, particularly in consultations over issues that seemed disproportionately petty. My boss sent me to a psychiatrist,whom I ambivalently consulted over a few months, insisting that I did not have a mental illness, 'just' grief, all the while continuing to attend Raquel's children's classes .

(To her credit, the psychiatrist sent me straight back to work.)

In the work shown here we 'children' were invited to construct a painting in which there is a dialogue between two famous artist's styles. Mine was a dialogue between a fantastic world of Miro style flying birds outside my windows and i don't remember whose style inside. I worked on it over a month or so in layers. At first I was really only interested in the bright creatures outside the window in that far away, make-believe but maybe reachable world. The inside was sparsely furnished and dull, although the guitar and mandolin did have something...

The psychiatrist was interested in the interior and she suggested simply that I explore this further. As I did during my art time I became particularly and deeply attached to the sofa. I loved its colour, pattern, oldness, comfortable deep cosiness, bottom pleats, broad arms,  worn areas... the fabric reminded me of 50s curtains from my 60s childhood... I worked and re-worked the sofa in response to Raquel's tips on how to use shading and pattern to give it depth. I also liked the big bodies of the instruments, re-inforced by the application of domestic brown paper and silk ties from the hospital. I worked on the floor and the wallpaper and spent a long time on the lamp. The astute will recognise the furry cat's tail in bottom left.

By the time i 'finished' the painting the outside seemed gaudy and uni-dimensional and the inside rich and full of meaning.

What I perceived happening during the two months was a movement away from a fragile and potentially dangerous complete immersion in 'the beyond' and the difficulties in its compatibility with ordinary life, to an awareness of the great resounding richness and depth of my ordinary domestic life, albeit coloured by the strange and wondrous sights beyond, (and by the cat, present but 'just out of reach') .

I called the painting, 'while my guitar gently weeps'.