Because today is mother’s day, I’ll post photos of some of the pieces recently completed or in progress in my studio right now. I’m still working on images of babies and children, as I did last year with this encaustic series, In Memory of Childhood. In the process of drawing all these kids and babies, I’m marveling over the odd proportions of babies’ heads and bodies and the changes as they mature from babies into kids into adolescents.

These baby images are, in my mind, connected to my ongoing series of large-scale figurative paintings. They have the same sort of closed forms and curved bodies, and have an internally-focused feeling to them. From left to right, they are: chalk/mixed-media on paper, 26″x40″;  encaustic on panel (the upper half of a vertical diptych), 24″x36″; and oil on canvas, 48″x60″.

These three are largish oil paintings, almost as tall as I am, and they are perhaps finished and perhaps not.  They are all oil on canvas, 60″x58″.  See my previous post for an in situ photo showing the scale more clearly.

When my teenage daughter saw the baby painting, she said, “Mom! Do NOT put that in my room when I’m asleep!”  (I have to admit, the thought hadn’t even occurred to me until she said that, but what a great idea!)  The scale is slightly disconcerting, but the size serves to remind me of how large a baby looms in one’s life, regardless of their tiny size at birth.

I have to consider these three smaller drawings finished because the paper cannot be worked anymore.  They are all Pastel/Chalk/Charcoal/Wax on Paper, 32″x30″, 2014.

Happy Mother’s Day, to my own mother and to all my fellow matresfamilias!