Helen Redman

During my ninth month of pregnancy, I created a series of drawings of my child to be, Nicole, as I imagined her inside of me. It was a way to survive the death of my first child Paula that occurred when I was pregnant with Nicole. In the midst of such continuing grief, I was nevertheless aware of artistic self-authorship: “Here is my body, my child is within, and I am drawing myself as both a woman artist and an expectant mother!”

The drawing is oil crayon on paper—a greasy, rough, expressionistic, scribbly medium that allows for no changes. My natural drawing scale is just larger than life size and the color choices are emotional. While I stare myself down in the mirror, I review fetus development in birth manuals to prepare for a natural Lamaze childbirth.

I had been trained to perform like male artists—the “universal” model of the time. After having been through a death as a mother at the young age of 24, I needed my art to visualize a healthy life for the new baby. In 1964, when Abstract Expressionism was giving way to Minimalism, I was a recent University of Colorado MFA graduate living in Paris. After my child Nicole was born, I continued to chronicle her life from infancy to her own pregnancies and motherhood. Well before the feminist art movement encouraged us to examine and respect our experiences as women, I chose to weave my life as a mother into my art.

My angle of vision is that of a mother as I both hold and draw my new baby. Historically, male artists defined their Madonna and child images by observing from the outside. I drew Nicole from within the cocoon we shared working rapidly and directly. A squiggly baby and a scribbly oil crayon demand immediacy; yet countless hours of life drawing classes underlie the spontaneity.

As a mother you constantly read a sign language of need—keenly aware of the way a baby plops its body, moves its lips, gestures its hands. After the loss of my first daughter, I could not take my eyes off of Nicole and my watchful maternal eye kept on recording her. Through infancy, childhood, adolescence, and even her own motherhood, I kept observing, exploring and affirming her life in my art.

The right to choose the subject of my own art and to weave it into my life as a mother in the heyday of abstract art was a pre-feminist choice. To be taken seriously at that time most women artists avoided traditional gendered roles and subjects. “Modern art” had no congruence with women exploring their roles as nurturers. My personal experience of bearing and raising children formed the core of my art and my life, no matter how many other subjects I depicted over the years.

I composed this iconic portrait of Nicole with objects and mementos that were part of her world from quilts and fabrics to book characters and stuffed animals. As I watched Nicole enter puberty, there was both apprehension and levity in my perception of her and this female passage. The Rabbit from Alice and Wonderland looks at his watch—time is passing. Two large stuffed animals, a snake and a frog address Nicole’s unfolding sexuality. The serpent suggests Eve’s temptation; the cabbage rose, coming out of her head is a parody on the apple. Spectacled and freckled, still a kid, she explores vamping and femininity in a wrapped-around silk shawl.

All of my portraits invite you to know a person as they pictorially evolve on several levels. My penchant for color and patterns (awakened in Morocco) makes the art appealing to a child, yet the character inside Nicole is more complex and moody. Her girlish stance foretells the strong woman she will become and invites you to participate in her development.

Nine months pregnant, my daughter Nicole (now 20), is unabashedly sexual in her fullness. Her comfort in her own body and her choosing single motherhood are all being recorded by me. The back-story is hard, but we are both celebrating this numinous moment.

The empathic nature of portraiture, the empathic nature of mother and daughter are joined in this painting. Again I am aware of gaze—hers and mine—direct, female and flamboyant. Together we express the sensuality of her beautiful pregnant body and the sacredness of bringing her child, my grandchild, into life.

Continuing to surround Nicole with opulent patterns, I paint the quilt given to me at her birth. That same quilt (created by my colleague, Radka Donnell) is featured in several paintings of Nicole’s development. It symbolizes the sisterhood and handiwork of other women artists while adding the play of baby blocks. I announce the bigness of the moment in lush, vivid color and larger than life-size scale. This is a mantra of empowerment for all of us.

In 1992, I began exploring the passage of menopause using my own body as a creative source. Painting in acrylics, my palette became fiery and expressionistic in ways that echoed the stirrings in my body as they emanated from inside-out. I depicted the most obvious of menopause signals, the hot flash, by layering a progression of colors from flesh pinks to flame reds.

Returning to the self-portrait as a way to study my new wrinkles and strands of gray hair, I used humor to address the sense of transience and mortality which menopause brings to the fore. I surrounded myself with skeletal forms that mirror my passions: painting, swimming, walking and yoga. My artistic guides on this journey were Frida Kahlo, Posada and the Mexican esqueletos from The Day of the Dead.

When I began this work, menopause was emerging from the taboo zone into a highly commercialized/medicalized subject. I chose a natural route and had to fight for that choice just as I had years before to have natural childbirth. My art, along with the research and writings of other women, helped me to fully embrace this powerful and dramatic passage.

As I created and showed art about menopause, it stimulated dialogue with other women that continued to expand, reaching a post-studio zenith in my internet site (originally titled: Birthing the Crone: Menopause and Aging Through an Artist’s Eyes).

The glasses on my ever-observing eyes are now skull sockets and I’m facing my own mortality. Playing with “memento-mori” and transformation, I am both wilting and still red with bloom. The bulb of my heart signifies regeneration and the agency of my life as an artist is again declared.

While this portrait begins with a literal look at myself in the mirror it soon takes on an imagined life of its own. Dualities of humor and fear, beauty and decay, inside and outside, are part of the hybrid mix in my aging self-portraits. To be honest in our age seems a feminist strategy in a culture that teaches us denial and self-rejection. I do not want the inevitable and natural changes in my face and body made malevolent. As women we need to find our own images of aging; “our bodies, ourselves” applies as much, if not more so, than it has all along the life span.

The golden young feet moving forward are those of my granddaughter Shira. The old wood textured feet astride and behind her are mine. She steps forward into the future—I support her from the past, but at this moment we are both present.

Shira comes to visit when I am working on a mixed media series called “Sole to Soul.” My elder explorations are no longer focused on face or hands. Instead, I look down at my aging feet and imagine figure and ground relationships physically and metaphorically inspired by my practice of yoga and meditation.

Once again, family walks back into my art and I invite Shira into my pictorial space. Together we create intergenerational footprints. The seven images (from 1964 to 2006) chosen for this Feminist Art Base are all part of my “Life Line of Art” chronicles. While many other themes and styles have occupied me, family continues to be a core component in my artistic life.