As a mother there are 2 ways that I cope with disarray.

In the morning I clean, sort, do laundry, do dishes and organize things. In the late afternoon and evening I am tired and I let the chaos happen, books are left on the floor, laundry thrown about, toys scattered but I am too burnt out to be effective and I just look at it all.

I am making diptychs to emulate both of my mothering chaos responses. Each scene is painted twice, once organizing chaos and once letting the chaos fly, then I put both paintings side-by-side to experience the differences. I painted the organizing chaos in the mornings when I have energy and the letting chaos happen in the afternoons and early evenings when I am tired. For my subject matter I searched for bits of vegetation, that when looked at, would make me feel queasy and overwhelmed, causing me to think “There is no way I can paint that! It is too much!”

I was participating in a Readings and Creative Writing for Artist Mothers Workshop organized by Mawa. While reading about mothers who make art work a reoccurring reference to chaos interested me. When you live with small children there is a state of physical mess, toys, cloths, books, food and paper and a state of mental chaos as demands for time and memory overwhelm. As a mother I have gained skills of sorting and living with levels of chaos. I am taking this mothering skill and applying it to a neutral image. I take a scene of branches, leaves, rotting decay and shooting new growth that all mix together and vie for equal attention and sort and make order of this on a canvas.

I painted this series for 3 summers.

I began my “Handling Chaos” project during a two week Deep Bay Residency August 13 -26, 2012 thanks to Manitoba Arts Council and Parks Canada. I painted 6 diptychs at Clear Lake. I felt very Canadian as I recorded  Canadian plants and learned to identify those that I was painting: Giant Hyssop, Wild Rose, Horsetail, Cattail, Wild Raspberries, Purple Asters, Black-Eyed Susan, Prairie Sage, Canadian Thistle Gooseberry, Kinnikinnick and others. Out in nature I had to paint with intensity as the subject was shifting due to changing light, wind, rain and sun.  Painting intensely days on end improved my painting skills and my ability to quickly get to the meaning of an image.

I continued this series the summers of 2013 and 2014 thanks to a Winnipeg Arts Council grant. This grant enabled me time and supplies to create more work so I had enough paintings for my first solo exhibition in 21 years.

A Handling Chaos exhibition showed at the  Wasagaming Community Arts Centre, Riding Mountain National Park, Manitoba, July 25th - August 13th, 2014. I made a printed catalogue for the show.

In 2017 Handling Chaos, toured rural Manitoba throughthe Manitoba Arts Network:

Golden Prairie Arts Council, Carmen, MB,

Burrows Trails Arts Council, McCreary, MB

Pembina Hills Arts Council, Morden, MB

Fort la Reine Museum, Portage La Prairie, MB

My art practice had 3 major shifts. 

Mid-way through Handling Chaos I switched mediums from acrylic to oil paint. The long hours of painting the diptychs submerged me into the new-to-me medium and I became at ease using oils.  Longer wet working time gave me longer blending time. My capacity to create depth, gradients and mixes of colours expanded. Oil  allowed me to make thinner lines for grasses and stems. Because of this shift, the production time of my work slowed down and my paintings filled with detail.

I painted the organizing chaos in the mornings and chaos in the afternoons and evenings. When I painted the same scene over several days I always worked on the same one in the mornings and the other one always later in the day. But in the second year I started working with the diptychs side-by-side. This two easel set-up enabled me to flow ideas back and forth between the two canvases.

I had a winter of waiting for the plants to return, between the summers of 2013 and 2014. While I waited I thought a lot about my intentions. I thought about the chaos canvases and of how I was channelling a feeling inside while painting and hoping that it would come out in paint. I wanted to consciously try techniques of obscuring areas and working other areas of clarity. I thought that the “feel something and let it come out” strategy was good but it was not leading me forward as a painter. I may just be sitting in my old groove of doing things. New ways of working needed to be consciously brought forward.  So when I began painting in the spring of 2014 I had new pre-set notions and my old natural flow and these both worked together with sometimes one dominating and sometimes the other usurping.

I feel alive and sparky when painting this way.

Painting en-plein-air brings an intensity of decision making and therefore an intensity of image. I like it's do it now or never mark making mindset. 

When I am understanding the chaos, I paint identifiable plants, spatial depth and lighting, I try very hard to paint continuously to capture it all. When I let the chaos wash over me, I am more contemplative, pausing to consider how I feel about each bit of the scene and paint that feeling. I discovered that when I am overwhelmed and tired I focus on one area at a time in detail but my eyes whoosh over and blur out the rest. These pockets of clarity and pockets of void translated well into paint. 

Exhibition Catalogue