Domestic Triptych, toilet seat, skillet, laundry basket, 2007

In 2007 I was taking a painting class at my local Community College and trying to think of interesting subjects to paint. One day I was on my knees scrubbing a toilet when my teenaged son came in and we had a really good conversation – while I continued to scrub the toilet. Later I reflected on the thought that motherhood is frequently a combination of the mundane and the sublime. I decided to do a painting of a mother and child, a sort of modern day Madonna, but frame it in a toilet seat to try and reflect that moment with my son and the little epiphany it sparked. When I took the piece into critique in my painting class, though, I was really surprised to find that absolutely no one reacted to the piece in the way that I had intended. Instead they thought it was a really negative commentary, “Motherhood belongs in the toilet, motherhood is shit,” things like that. The suggestion from my painting teacher was that possibly making a grouping with more paintings framed in other domestic non-toilet objects might better convey what I was trying to get across. I tried that (I wish I had a photograph of the objects with the paintings – I will go through old photographs sometime and see if I do), adding a skillet and a laundry basket, and the piece was okay. But only okay. Then my sculpture teacher pointed out that the paintings were really superfluous, that just the objects themselves, elevated by being displayed in a grouping on a gallery wall, were much more powerful and better reflected my idea. He was right and above you see the final result. In “The Writing Life,” by Annie Dillard, she says (I am paraphrasing from my somewhat faulty memory here) that sometimes in writing you end up coming to the realization that you need to discard the original idea that started the work off in the first place and that is always kind of a painful thing to have to do, because that was THE WHOLE POINT and now you are getting rid of it. There are many, many parallels between writing and making art and this is definitely one of them.