I am not sure there’s anything quite as elusive as attempting to paint a meditative state. When that meditative state is one achieved during childbirth, and the painting is one you intend to share publicly, the challenge becomes quite formidable. It’s probably impossible, but I persisted. This piece has taken several forms before this one. It is, at the very least, an interior landscape and my best approximation in pigment of an experience that utterly defies description, verbal or visual.
The space I inhabited was a timeless, opalescent cradle of existence that held me, mind, body, and soul. There were a few hours when my son was making his way into the world when the veil parted, allowing me into a realm where my body became at once everything and nothing. I floated in a limitless ocean of strength and experience, not mine, but borrowed from eons of women before me. Surprisingly long-feeling stretches of time elapsed between contractions in a sort of timeless nowhere that offered such deep rest. This space sheltered and comforted and encouraged me, and I made way for little Ansel to join us here on Earth.
I have painted it as a landscape in hopes that it feels familiar, that it might speak to everyone’s experience of peace, or primitive sources of strength, or the comforting arms of the Mother. The mirrored light—with its sense of yet more space and light beyond—reminds us “as above, so below.” Every story is a little spark of the Great Story, flickering briefly within the margins of a single life.