I think I have finished this piece.
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| Life Coming Through Her Gel Pen on Paper 13"x20" $850 unframed |
A friend looked at this image yesterday, looked at me quizically and challenged, "Susan, this seems like an anti-abortion piece." I didn't know how to respond. I am not against abortion. I am deeply in favor of a woman's right to choose what is right for her. And I am deeply in love with pregnancy and birth and babies, and especially with my own precious children. I am very thankful I never had to decide whether to have an abortion or not. And I am equally thankfully that some of my friends did have that option and were able to take it and save the arch of their lives and that of their unborn children from the chaos and suffering that would have ensued had the children come into this world.
To me, this piece is about the sanctity of life. Absolutely. The woman portrayed in this piece chose to become pregnant and was deeply happy to be carrying her child. It was the right thing for her at the right time in her life (at least as far as I know based on the conversations we had. I can't begin to assert I know everything in her heart or mind!) My intention with this piece is to portray a beautiful woman at one of the most beautiful times of her life as she prayerfully considers her unborn child. It evokes for me that time in my own life when I felt my children inside my womb, when my body was a vessel for their body and their spirit. This piece feels very calm and centered, as I felt when creating it. The repetition of the marks created a calmness in me that gave rise to contemplation and quiet joy.
But a posterchild for anti-abortion? No.
An image of the sanctity of life. Yes.
I think most people could agree that life is sacred and that giving birth to a wanted child is one of the most sacred acts a person can do. The grey area comes, I think, from other situations - ones where the child is not wanted, or the woman can't care for the child and lives in fear and poverty with it, or the child is a product of rape or coercion - then what?
I don't have the answer. I wish we could find common ground here, though, for the conversation. It's complicated. Complex. There is no simple answer. The moral complexities are daunting. Each person will have personal experiences which inform their responses/reactions. How different our country could be if we could sit with each other and confer with gentle curiosity and a desire to learn from each other about these difficult questions - with compassion for the challenges and difficulties, with awareness and respect for the blessing that each child can be, with a willingness to hear many different facets of a situation. When we know a person's story and understand their motivations and challenges, it becomes so much more difficult to judge them.
Can you begin to imagine a world where life is sacred, and each life is honored, and women are trusted to make decisions for themselves and their unborn children? It is SO complex to even try to imagine it - it feels risky to even ask the question!
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| The beginning. I saw an image in National Geographic which wouldn't leave me alone, so I decided to include it in the piece. My attempt here was to create marks which would create a sense of volume around the belly. |
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| The marks I made on the left to create a sense of depth and darness weren't dark enough because gel pens don't come in very dark values! I used ink here to deepen the value contrast. |
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| Working to fill the page with marks. I wanted to have the marks indicate the volume of each bady part. |
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| By this point, it was painfully obvious to me that the dark was much too dark and contrasted too strongly with the rest of the piece. But I liked the breasts and hands. |
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| I lightened the darks by putting blue into them so they weren't so dominant. |
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| I strengthened the lights so they stood out more and increased some of the depth, refined what I could. It is now finally reading as I want it to and feels like I've said what I wanted to say with it: the pregnant body is gorgeous. Life is sacred. |
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