Creative Heroines

This post was created for the Carnival of Creative Mothers to celebrate the launch of  The Rainbow Way: Cultivating Creativity in the Midst of Motherhood
by Lucy H. Pearce.  Today's topic Creative Heroines. 

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There have been so many female artists that have inspired me to create in the way that I do but if I had to narrow it down I think I would have to choose Meinrad Craighead, Frida Kahlo and Vali Myers. Meinrad for her exquisite encapsulation of the Dark Feminine as a fierce and deeply loving force, for the magnitude and astonishing depth of her vision. She speaks to my soul like no other ever has. Frida for her exquisite honesty and for the way in which her pain became the gateway of her salvation, and Vali for the fierceness of her authenticity, her self-governance and for her profoundly wild nature.

Enclosed Garden                                                               Meinrad Craighead

Glaringly obvious to me as I write this is the fact that none of these women were/are mothers. And allthough they all reflect a deep kinship with their animal familiars, each of their primary focus in life has been their art. I have often pondered the weight of this power, that is birthed from women when children are not their destiny, and have many a time baulked at the notion of trying to be both a mother and an artist. I feel a conflict within myself rise, one that has the potential to feed into a despair at ever being able to create anything significant and also be this mother that I am, hands so full of children and domesticity.

But when I really listen to what these women gift me with,the quality that I feel has so deeply resonated for me has been their profound insight into that deeply primal matrix of the vast Mother, the feminine force that carries the weight of life and death, nurturance and transmutation, so powerfully in the palm of her hand.

The Love embrace of the Universe, the Earth (Mexico), Myself, Diego and senor Xolotl

-Frida Kahlo

Each of these women have shown me in their own unique way how to forge my own personal relationship with that primal feminine force which knocks at the door of the psyche, asking to be birthed into the world. They have taught me that the relationship with God and the authority to know of the sacred movement of spirit in my life, is deeply embedded in my body and in the narrative of my own life. They have fed that insatiable hunger in me for something more anciently true and primordially real, than anything else my culture was feeding me in regard to what it was to be a woman.

These artists have taught me that as a woman my relationship to the divine is profoundly rooted in the earthly relationships of my body and it’s wild interface with nature and the cycles of the Earth. This lesson is paradoxically the same lesson that my children have birthed in me, awakening me to my own power as a creatrix, awakening me to the profound depth of my own capacity as a woman to love, to birth myself and to care for all creation.

The more I turn my own authority over to this primordial interface of the body/the earth/the divine, the less conflicted I feel about the balance of motherhood and art, as it all ultimately flows from that same deep wellspring of the sacred feminine, birthing itself into being upon the Earth, as it has always done and ever will do, even through the times when She has been met with violence and brutality and desecration.

Witch of Positano                                                  Vali Myers

I am eternally grateful to these Matriachs of the art world for their renewal of a primary imprint of what God the Mother looks like, deeply imbedded in the primacy of one’s own story. They give  me permission to follow the hunt of my own creative nature. They reveal to me the power of birthing something so infinitely tender and intimate, and so fiercely potent into the world and standing strong in the care of that vision, despite sometimes great odds. I feel that I am learning the primacy of what it means to truly care for what it is that I create, be it a piece of art or a child. How do I come to take full responsibility for my feminine nature in a world so desensitised? How do I defy the stereotypes and projections of my culture and fully own my personal vision and creation as my deepest truth? These women guide me with their courage, their wild authority and their deep authenticity.