ART & INTUITION

How I Started to Believe in Myself Again

And that my dreams could come true.

January 1987. I was twenty-eight years old and I’d given up on my dream of becoming an artist. Feared I would turn out like the generations of women before me. Women suffering through the wayward ways of men.

Opportunities seemed for other women. Woman unlike me. Women with education. Women in the city. Women who could attend university. Women with a choice.

As I’d heard my parents say, you made your bed; you lie in it. I had married an alcoholic. Had three young children. I’d made my bed.

Yet I saw a glimmer of hope. Our eldest daughter would start school in the fall, our second child would attend nursery school three afternoons a week. The youngest would turn two. I welcomed more time for myself and the possibility of resurrecting my dream of creating art again.

In my teens, I had wanted to study art, but circumstances prevented that from happening.

After years of drinking and bad relationships with men, I did what those around me did — I got married and settled down. Threw out all my art supplies. Declared my art-making days over. Done with crazy dreams. Determined to face “real life.”.

For years after marrying, I sewed handmade quilts and other necessary quilted items for our home.

But hard as I tried, It wasn’t enough. I yearned for something more. Yearned to paint and create like before.

I only had pencil and paper to start again. It wasn’t enough. I knew I needed more, but we had no money to buy art supplies.

Though I didn’t know it at the time, an answer was close at hand.

Months earlier, my mother had given me a picture frame she’d purchased at a yard sale. I took the six-by-sixteen-inch frame from her, said it was nice, and thanked her.

In hindsight, she’d handed me the catalyst for change. Almost like a magic potion in a fairy tale.

“Maybe you can put pictures of the kids in it,” she said.

“Nah,” I said. “I’ll find something else.”

With no idea what it might be. I hung the empty frame on the bathroom wall. There it remained for months.

When I sat on the toilet, I wondered what could fill that space. Along with wondering about what would fill the emptiness inside me.

A friend suggested a mirror.

Too simple a solution.

I kept waiting. Kept wondering. Trusting the answer would come.

Then one day, like a flash of lightning in my mind’s eye, I saw little black, white, and grey heads overlapping in a crowd. I sketched out the vision.

I realized maybe, just maybe, I could use fabric instead of paint. A needle and thread instead of a brush. I could use what I have available.

Excited, I placed a layer of quilt batting between two pieces of white cotton fabric and set to work appliquéing, a technique I’d not done before.

The little heads overlapped one another in a pattern similar to a one I’d seen in a quilting book of a flower garden. Simple, childlike U-shaped petals, each one overlapping others.

Instead of flowers on a large scale, I stitched tiny little heads in the lack of colour I’d worked in when I’d stopped painting after getting married.

Having no appliquéing experience, the stitches were uneven and crude, but I didn’t let that discourage me. I kept stabbing the needle in and out of the layers of fabric. Stitch after stitch. Like footsteps down a foreign path. I kept going until little heads filled the frame.

I finished the picture with no idea how my creation spoke of how lost I was in the crowd, how desperately I needed to find where I belonged. I had no clue my life was being expressed in my art.

After putting the finished picture in the frame, I hung it on our living room wall, believing magic possible and that my life could start to change for the better.

This is the first of a weekly series of about my art journey and following my inner voice.