The Temperance Card

I am very honored to be included in the 78 tarot project.  This is a global project that includes 78 artists, each making one tarot card for a collaborative deck.  My card is the major card "Temperance".  I thought I would briefly write a little about my process and why I chose the symbolism I did for the card.
First I sketched this out on paper with my first ideas for the work.

I wanted to include some of the traditional symbols of the Temperance card, but change them up a little.  Usually the card pictures an angel, often thought to be the Archangel Gabriel or an androgynous being, holding two cups and pouring water both out of and into each cup at once as if he is maintaining a delicate balance of the water (which is usually symbolic of both emotions and spiritual essence).  Gabriel stands with one foot on the earth and one foot in the water to also symbolize that delicate balance between our emotions and being grounded, or between the spiritual and the material worlds.
For my card I still chose to draw an angel, possibly Gabriel.  I have chosen to represent the two forces that need to be balanced as swans as swans are an animal that live both on the land and water.  For this reason swans are a strong symbol used in a lot of ancient myth the world over.  They were believed to travel across the veil into the Otherworld and can often lead people from this material world into the Otherworld, or spirit world.  One of my swans is painted black and stands in the water, the other is white and stands upon the earth.  The black swan represents the material world and yet stands upon the water of spirit.  The white swan represents the spirit world, and yet stands upon the material.  So in a sense I wanted to continually mix up these two symbols showing their need for balance or temperance, just as the water has to be continually balanced in the traditional card.
The swans are also standing in a defensive pose as if they might attack one another.  This is showing how these two forces are always at odds with one another and again our need for balance.  The triangle on her chest is a traditional symbol and represents the feminine energies being protected by natural law.
I changed up a few things from my sketch into the final painting, which was done in soft pastel and colored pencil.  Here is the final card:

The egg shape above the triangle is representative of the ancient Orphic Egg or Cosmic egg.  In ancient Greek myth the first hermaphroditic being hatched from the cosmic egg. The Temperance card is about bringing balance, patience, and moderation into your life.  The cosmic egg represents our dreams protected delicately at our heart, and shows the need to protect it, and to balance it in the middle of those warring energies of spirit and material needs, so that we can manifest those dreams when it is time.

Those are the main symbols in the card.  I had a lot of fun manifesting it.  Please be sure to check out the 78 Tarot project to see all the cards and learn about their creation.

The Temperance card original painting is also currently available.  Please contact me at moonspiralart@yahoo.com if interested in purchasing.

A mother or an artist first?

Have you seen the movie "Who Does She Think She Is?"?  It is really inspiring, especially if you are an artist and a mother.  Actually every woman should see it because it touches on something for all of us as women.
I became an artist after I had kids.  I thought it would be the perfect way to stay at home with my children and bring in some income for my family.  I thought it would be easy....haha.  What soon happened was I uncovered my deepest desire was this need to create.  Images flood my head constantly and I needed to get them out.  I did not know how much this was a part of me until after I had my children.  In my twenties I was pretty aimless.  I was happy waiting tables to make money to go out and see live music and drink a pint or two of Guinness.  I didn't have the depth and wisdom I own now, and I doubt my artwork would have held much meaning then.
I can't say I am not more than a little jealous of female artists in their twenties who are often single, but even when they are not they do not have kids.  I imagine them locked in their studios all day painting away with no one tugging on their shirt sleeve asking when dinner is going to be ready.  I guess it is just my fate that I didn't discover this desire to be an artist until late, but also I had another desire that hit me in my mid twenties....I wanted to have a baby.
I had my first child at 27, and my second at 30.  I didn't start painting until my youngest was about 2, so only about 5 years ago.  I remember when she was 2 I was working in soft pastels.  She always wanted to (and still does) draw with me while I was working.  I set up a little easel for her in my studio next to mine.  I remember once I wasn't looking and she decided to add a bunch of scribbles with a sharpie to a beautiful angel with a dove I just completed.  I think that was the first moment I realized I had a conflict within me.  What was more important to me, my children or my art.
Now that may sound crazy and selfish.  Of course my children mean the world to me, they mean everything to me.....and yet, they are not all of me.  They actually do not define me as much as my art does.  I have known a lot of my mom friends that do define themselves by their children.  I have watched them deal with depression as their children grow and they begin to realize they need another definition or they are going to disappear.
So I have this art, and yet I struggle constantly with guilt.  Am I ignoring my kids to paint?  Yes, and no.  They get to see a woman following her deepest desire.  They get to see a woman who will give up so many things to follow her dream.  And also, they get to see me struggle inside when they ask me to play while I am in the middle of a painting.....and just as many times as I say "not right now", they hear "okay".  I do give up painting a lot for them, but I say no to them too.  It is a fine balance that I struggle with constantly.
So obviously this movie has me thinking a lot about us mom artists.  I am toying with the idea of creating some kind of artist collective of mom artists.  I would like it to be a group of really good mom artists that are really making it as professional artists....to show the world it can be done.  It's just a thought.  But for now I am thinking I might start a little group on Facebook and maybe start another blog.  I am not very good at writing in this one, so that might be too much for me.  But I would like to start a blog that highlights an amazing mom artist each week with an interview that touches on subjects like I just talked about above.  You rarely hear that kind of personal struggle in an artist interview.  Most artists interviews are full of a bunch of intangible philosophical dribble that really doesn't inspire you.  I think it would help a lot of women to hear how an artist struggles everyday to balance her life, and yet still follow her soul's calling.
So please let me know what you think.  Would you like to read a blog like that, or maybe be involved in whatever comes out of it.

Struggling with Perfectionism and my latest work

Perfectionism can kill art.  It killed one of my pieces I started last week.  I had a beautiful drawing, but then I started painting.  I was trying some techniques that I saw another artist do.  I was trying to be that artist I suppose, and got aggravated that I wasn't...and ruined the piece.  I realize that I don't need to be another artist, but sometimes perfectionism, or the ego, creeps in...and kills art.
So I started on another one.  This time I found the perfect face somewhere on the Internet.  She is my perfect model, my perfect symbol of beauty.  I wanted to draw her and it had to be exactly like her.  Well I started drawing, and lil' miss perfectionist came right back in.  "It doesn't look like her", "You can't get the lips right", "that left eye isn't right".  I erased and erased, and finally decided that I had a pretty close representation, even though it was not perfect.  Here is the beginning drawing:

The lips were driving me batty at this stage....and that left eye still.  But I started to slap on some paint.  I am experimenting with a more neutral background than my norm.  Here she is with the first bit of paint:

Starting to come to life, but I was still very displeased.  She doesn't look enough like my model.  I was fretting a lot about the lips at this point.  Now I am looking at them here and suddenly they look great to me.  I changed them a bit though, and here is where she is now (I think I might try to take the lips back to where they were above though).:

Sorry the pic is a little grainy, it was taken last night.  Anyway, this little gal is a Leanan Sidhe.  These are faerie women that are believed to attach themselves to artists.  Irish folklore says they are beautiful dark muses that both provide inspiration and suck the life from their host.  Many artists are driven mad and die young because of their relationship with a Leanan Sidhe. 
I think this is in a way a metaphor for the artistic inspiration itself.  It comes in and you fall in love with it like it is a beautiful lover.  But often, the ego mind sets in and you think the artistic inspiration is all you and from you, or your mind.  Eventually the inspiration wanes, and the artist can be driven mad when they can no longer find it anymore.
Then there is the perfectionism.  Driven by your mind, or ego, to create the perfect work of art, you can drive yourself mad.  I am laughing at myself here.  This little Leanan Sidhe is truly doing her job on me.  But I am starting to get that you can create your idea of perfect beauty, and it doesn't have to be perfect.  Although, if you are doing it in a state of joy instead of anxiety....it will in no way be imperfect.
I was inspired to write about artistic perfectionism after my gifted artist friend Steph Granshaw posted a work of Audrey Kawasaki's today on her Facebook page.  Audrey of course is a very gifted artist and fairly famous.  Her work always seems like sheer perfection, but the first thing I noticed about this work was that the right eye was way too far over to the right.  Now maybe most people that do not constantly paint faces wouldn't notice this.  But I sit and stared at it and thought about how much it would have drove me crazy and that I would have had to fix it.  But Audrey left it, and it is still perfect.  Here is the painting, go have a look and marvel at her other work if you haven't before.
Hope you are all walking the path of non-perfectionism today........

New wip and a rant

Haven't posted much this month.  I have been real busy painting and getting ready for this coming weekend's showing and next weekend's juried art show.  I promised you a rant in the title so here goes....
People who complain about art costing too much have no idea the amount of work that goes into being an artist.  I think most people think artists just happily paint for a few hours everyday and that is it.  We also collectively have this idea that to earn lots of money we must be working extremely hard at something we hate.
I wish that all I had to do was paint, but that alone would still take up a big chunk of my time.  Each painting I do takes me anywhere from 12 to 40 hours to complete, depending on size and difficulty.  This is usually spread out over many days, painting anywhere from 3 to 6 hours a day.  Once a painting is complete I have to varnish, wire, and sometimes frame.  Varnishing alone can take me hours to do, as I seem to have bad luck with it and often have to go repaint things I messed up with the varnish.  I do all my own framing and this is by no means easy or quickly done.
The other time consuming aspect of being an artist is the copying of your work, or taking photographs, scanning, etc.  I spend a lot of time photographing my pieces.  I have to do it outside on a good weather day.  This can be challenging at best.  Then I have to edit all my pieces in Photoshop to make them as close to the real work as possible to post online.  All of this can take me anywhere from 3 to 5 hours to do, on just one piece of art.  Next you spend time uploading art to all of your websites where you sell prints, Etsy, Red Bubble, etc.  This can often take up an afternoon.
Next you have making prints, packaging prints, shipping prints, making other things to sell like pendants (this takes up lots of time).  So if you add all this up we are going over 40 hours of work a week. 
Pricing your art is one of the hardest parts of being an artist.  What is it's value?  That is a hard question.  We certainly do not get paid for our time.  Just to make a nice round $10 bucks an hour we would have to sell a $400 painting a week, every week.  Then there is the obscure question of how good is it.  We all have seen artwork that sells for thousands that we wouldn't pay $10 for, and ones that sell for $100 that seem to be worth a lot more.
My pricing is random and somewhat based on how much I am attached to the work, and the size of the piece.  I am usually flexible though, and willing to hear offers of course.
Okay, that is about it for my rant, although I haven't even mentioned the high cost of art supplies.  Most of you reading this are artists too, so I am probably preaching to the choir.  But many of my friends that are not artists, even my own husband, have no idea what I do all day.  Somehow I have to fit in cleaning the house, grocery shopping, and taking care of my kids and myself in all of this.  Oh, and I left out the self-promotion on the internet time....like this blog....there is another few hours a day, just trying to get your work out there and seen (advertising).
Okay, on to my current work in progress.  I have been experimenting with different surfaces.  This one is small because it is a sample that I got from Raymar of one of their polyflax cotton canvas panels.  It is a very nice surface that I will definately try again.  It is also what sparked my rant, because it is only 9x12 inches, but I have already put about 12 hours into painting it and am still not totally done.  Just because it is smaller than many of my other works does not mean it is worth less.  I am also really loving it, it has changed a lot already from this pic I am posting now.