Work in Progress: Echinacea Still Life

{WIP Still Life - 24" x 18" (61 x 45.7 cm)}

Hello,

It has been a long time my friends and I have missed sharing thoughts about art and new work with you. Now that Naomi is seven weeks old and I am starting to get the swing of this "motherhood" thing, I am hopeful that I will be able to stop by more often.

Today I want to share the progress of a still life I began a few weeks before Naomi was born. In fact I worked on it the day before I went into the hospital...

When setting up this composition I was enamored with the flowers, the bird's nest and the symbolic meaning of the robin's egg, and how I was holding onto my own little one while painting. I worked furiously to complete this painting before my little girl would arrive but fate dictated something different, and it turns out it also gave me the breathing time I needed to get away from this painting and to come back to it with new eyes.

A few weeks after Naomi was born a good friend sent me a beautiful card with an image of one of Mary Cassatt's mother and baby pastels. I fell in love with this image and soon decided I wanted to incorporate it into the still life I had been working on, and so that is what happened.

Over the past week I have been re-working the painting to include this image as if it were a poster I had pinned up on the wall behind the still life setup of the echinacea and the bird's nest. I still need to work on getting the flowers to pop more forward and to then go back into the bird's nest and repaint it where I took it out to change the background.

Because of how this painting has progressed and evolved the tentative title is "Contemplating Motherhood". What do you think? Is this a good title or should it be simple like "Still life with Echinacea, Robin's Egg, and Print"? Please share with me what you think, I am waivering about what to name would work best.

It is nice being back.
Thanks for reading and stopping by.

Liz

PS. Here are a few photos of my seven week old :)

{Naomi in her supergirl pose}

{Naomi's baby smiles make me so happy}

So far I have been lucky in being able to grab a few hours here and there to paint. I am hopeful that as time goes by Naomi and I will get into a nice pattern of caring for her needs while also feeding my creative desire to get some time in the studio. Keep your fingers crossed that this is able to work out!