IMELDA ALMQVIST ART: JOURNEYS TO OTHER WORLDS, INNER WORLDS AND AROUND THE WORLD IN PAINTINGS!
Motherhood art, family life paintings, Yi: Poetic Description of a Pregnancy, Spirits Souls & Spirit Masters, Aurora Borealis and stillborn children, Sedna or Neqivik: the Sea Keeper, birth control, My Own Worst Enemy, The Before Life, Under My Wing, Sea Keeper: Sedna or Neqivik, City Child, the Labours of Eve, parenting in paintings, parenthood images, 'bump to bump' friendships, umbilical cords, Saudada, yearning, infertitlity, 'Wonder Woman', Virginia Hausegger, embryos, potential, Torschlusspanik (Gate Closing Panic), Adoption, Family Life Images, dysfunctional families, Family Ties, 'My Own Worst Enemy' , Menominee Dolls for Faithfulness, Roadmap for a Happy Marriage
FAMILY LIFE PORTFOLIO
SANDY BOTTOM! (Brendan 3 years old)
Picture from the Almqvist Family Album, Egypt 2008
NEWSFLASHES!
The paintings of this series have recently made their way to Australia (in digital form). They will feature on the 'mothering studies' syllabus and be used as course material for students. They will also be on display as a backdrop to a conference on Motherhood Studies in Australia this month (July 2007).
Hello Imelda,
my midwife called round this afternoon with the pastel I did for her. She had it framed before I could take a photo of it. So, quickly took one this afternoon. I thought you'd like to see it, you being the ultimate motherhood/parenthood, childhood/birth painter!
Debs
Debbie Price-Ewen, New Zealand
LIFE CHANGING EVENT, MONOPRINT 2008
OVER THE MOON (SOLD)
In the year 2000 our son Quinn was born. In 2001 another son, Elliott. The year 2004 brought a third son, Brendan. The paintings of the Motherhood Series examine different aspects of this whole new dimension to our life.
It starts with that 'Over The Moon' feeling of 'I AM PREGNANT!'
FAST AND FURIOUS (SOLD)
The notion of a pregnant angel is unconventional - and my own, not a medieval concept. However, the world needs as many angels as it can get! This painting has found a good home in Vienna.
YI: POETIC DESCRIPTION OF A PREGNANCY £550
Yi is a language spoken in Southern China. This passage describes a pregnancy in 10 months and very poetic images ('January likes the autumn rain', 'April is the four-legged snake', 'August unites mother's spirit')
Aboriginal tribes in Siberia believed that if a woman wished to fall pregnant, she had to to hunting for the Spirit Soul of her baby and fetch it home from the Spirit Masters. She was expected to go off and live in solitude while she did this. The Spirit Souls have the appearance of little birds fluttering from branch to branch!
COMMUNICATING! (80 x 100 cm) £599
This painting, from the Australian Aboriginal Series, shows babies communicating - friends already while still in the womb! While painting this I was thinking of many children I know personally who enjoy close friendships with other children they first met 'bump to bump'!
For more paintings inspired by the Australian Aboriginal worldview, please visit the AUSTRALIAN ABORIGINAL SERIES!
GIVING BIRTH (80 x 100 cm) £495
Pregnancy is inevitably followed by birth.
PARENTING: THE EARLY DAYS, MONOPRINT 2008
In the early days of parenting the mother feels at one with her child
(see also: Letting Go)
AURORA BOREALIS (80 x 100 cm) £625
This painting is from the Inuit (Eskimo) Series. The Inuit used to believe that the stars were holes through which snow, rain and the souls of dead people spilled. And Greenlanders thought the Aurora Borealis represented the souls ot stillborn children, kicking their umbilical cords.
This painting is in remembrance of all children who were born but didn't live. I love the thought of them being alive and (literally!) kicking in another world, the spirit world or a parallel universe...
MADONNA, monoprint 2008
MADONNA WHO LOST HER CHILD
monoprint 2008
PIETA: GRIEVING MADONNA
Monoprint 2008
SAUDADE (30 x 30 cm) £145
However, not everyone who wishes too, actually achieves pregnancy. There is the bitter pain of infertility or lost opportunity.
The Portugese word 'Saudade' means 'yearning' or a longing for the things that might have been. For me working on this painting coincided with reading the book 'Wonder Woman' by Virginia Hausegger. She writes very honestly about her pain at realising that she left parenthood too late. This book fed into the painting and the painting came took on the meaning of everything that didn't realise its potential, everything that didn't make it beyond the embryonic stage.
This painting is a close relative of another painting belonging to the LANGUAGE & MARK MAKING SERIES as well as the MOTHERHOOD SERIES: Torschlusspanik, see below)
TORSCHLUSSPANIK (30 x 30 cm) £145
'Torschlusspanik' is a German word that means 'Gate Closing Panic', the fear of losing out on opportunities as one gets older and the options narrow down. It is applied in particular to women who fear that they have left having babies until too late.
DIFFERENT ROADS TO MOTHERHOOD (80 x 100 cm) £495
Children don't grow on trees. Howver, one way of becoming a parent is by adopting a child. Adopting a child means taking on a child that is not homegrown, a child that does not carry your genetic material. Yet, once you adopt that child is your child every bit as much as any birth child.
We spend two years going through the UK adoption process. The idea was to adopt a girl to complete our family. The process was long and uncertain, we learnt many lessons along the way. Recently we closed the door on this, because the time has come to move on and enjoy having older children. Today I feel that our family is complete. The desire for a little girl has evaporated, I am enjoy my boys more than ever. But I do feel that adoption should have a mention on this page.
The figures in this painting were inspired by carved folklore figures from Venezuela. This painting belongs to the Mesoamerican Series as well.
ALL CONSUMING (80 x 100 cm) £399
When I asked our son Quinn (then aged 5) what he saw looking at this painting, he said: 'A ghost trying to eat fire!' Not a bad description of how I felt coping with the demands of a newborn baby for the first time!
THE FIRST SMILE, monoprint 2008
It has been claimed that the first smile, at 5 - 7 weeks, is 'programmed' to give you a life in spirits when you are at your most exhausted!
For us the birth of one child was followed by the birth of another child the next year. Looking after 'two under twos' (and myself) was All Consuming, devouring. But I also felt fiercely proud and protective of my children. At this point, using painting as a way to relive and make sense of things, I painted Under My Wing:
UNDER MY WING (Not For Sale)
I felt 'like an eagle' in many ways: keeping 'an eagle's eye' on my boys and 'wrapping my wings around them' for warmth, security, protection
SHAMAN MOTHER (SOLD)
This painting is from the Inuit (Eskimo) Series. In Siberia it was believed that a woman shaman lost her powers for a few years after having a baby. However, the Inuit had a different view on this. Sculptures exist of woman shamans going about their business as usual with a baby in the hood or pouch of their parka!
SEDNA I or MERMOTHER (80 x 100 cm) £525
Sedna or Neqivik is the Sea Keeper. She is a goddess, who looks rather like our idea of a mermaid and lives on the bottom of the sea. She controls the animal world. If she is angry she might keep the seals and fish and whales away from hunters. The Inuit, living in the harsh arctic region where winter lasts for most of the year, totally depend on the animals of the ocean to sustain themselves.
Sedna is not generally depicted as a mother in 'the human sense'. She leads a spinsterish life in her house on the bottom of the ocean. However, as the Sea Keeper she is the Mother of All Animals. She is an Ocean Mother as we speak of Earth Mothers in our part of the world.
UMBILICAL CORD (80 x 100 cm) £399
The umbilical cord is cut at birth. In the literal sense anyway. But there is a 'spiritual umbilical cord' that connects children and their parents for the rest of their lives.
INSIDE OUT (80 x 100 cm) £425
Children live in a world of their own. A world called 'The Here And Now'! The adult world and it's conventions, rules and expectations doesn't always make sense to them.
There are things my mother used to say that didn't touch me at all while I was a child. (For instance: "Close the door! We are not heating the house for the birds outside!") As a mother of three children myself I suddenly realise what she meant 30 years ago - I hear myself saying these things!
CITY CHILD (80 x 100 cm) £425
Once you have a child, the world suddenly seems a much scarier place... Menace lurks everywhere. You end up reassessing the world all over and seeing it through your child's eyes. I didn't always like what I saw.
THE LABOURS OF EVE (80 x 100 cm) £525
This painting is about how some things never change. Ever since she was cast out of Paradise, many labours have filled any day in the life of Eve....
ALL IN A DAY'S WORK (80 x 100 cm) £475
And this is the Companion Painting to The Labours of Eve. It is about much the same theme. About women keeping their families 'afloat' in any way they can.
ISHTAR SUCKLING TWINS (80 x 100 cm) £485
The Akkadian goddess Ishtar (also known as Astarte or as Inanna to Sumerians) is shown here suckling twins. This painting was inspired by a bronze portal from the San Zeno Cathedral in Verona, showing both Ishtar and the Greek Gaia (Earth Goddess) nursing their children. In Hebrew Ishtar or Astarte's name translates as 'grove' and she is often shown as the Tree of Life. Ishtar's lover was the god Dumuzi. Ishtar and her brother Utu were twins.
IRIAN JAYA MOTHER (size?) £225
RISING SUNS, RAISING SONS, monoprint 2008
LETTING GO
Parenting is about 'painting yourself out of the picture'...
PARENTING: THE OTHERNESS
I think most (if not all) parenfs have marvelled at the Otherness of their children. From birth they are very much their own people, not some kind of 'extension of you' !
THE SACRED LANDSCAPE OF MARRIAGE £350
I made this painting after doing a piece of shamanic work reflecting on the challenges that being married throws up, in the autumn of 2008. (To read more about Shamanism please visit theSHAMANISM PAGE and the SEEING PAGE).
I was shown a beautiful landscape that stretched out in front of me. There was a cave nearby, the River of Life flowed through it and in the distance there were regions as yet unexplored.
I was told that this is the Sacred Landscape of Marriage: there is much left to discover, even after many years together (in our case 23). We have to dip into the River of Life from time to time to water our marriage and keep it alive. Our past and the past of family ancestors lives on in the cave and can be visited. The two people in a marriage are seperate individuals who feel at home in different settings an elements. The art of marriage is to build bridges and meet on common ground. Cubs live in the Sacred Landscape of Marriage and it is in our gift to look after them and raise them as well as we can - after all they chose us for their parents.
The most important lesson I received was not to give up lightly: we chose the lessons that marriage offers and there are great riches to be discovered in sticking with those challenges and seeing where they take us.
BIRTH CONTROL (80 x 100 cm) £499
And that brings us to an issue the Pope disapproves of: the flip-side of the coin, as it were, Birth Control. We now live in an era where western women have careers and make their own way in the world. We choose to have children. We don't just keep on having them non-stop for 20 years (as good Roman Catholic couples used to do). This painting is about fertility spinning out of control - about the need for birth control!
Today...
Updating this page in October 2009. Our nine year old son (10 in January 2010) is shapeshifting into a teenager before our very eyes. At the swimming pool recently he showed me his legs are hairy and asked me to buy him some deodorant! The teenage years are upon us!! This same son also reports that they are doing a thing called 'sex education' in school. Personally he isn't planning to kiss a girl EVER, so it is a complete waste of time.... Right!
Today our boys are 9, 7 1/2 & 5 years old
Quinn and Elliott are keen artists themselves. Quinn comes up with amazing titles and subjects for pictures, (such as 'Daddy As A Pregnant Spider', see About Me). In the period that I was working on the Sedna (or Sea Keeper) paintings of the Inuit series (April 2005) I came downstairs at 7 am one morning. The boys were in full swing with a series of mermaid pictures. They had started off just drawing Sedna as a mermaid with long hair flowing all over the paper. Elliott was at the head-footer stage and needed Quinn's help in attaching a fish-tail. It then occurred to them that living all by yourself on the bottom of the sea is a rather lonely kind of existence. So they decided to give Sedna a husband and children so she wouldn't feel lonely any longer...
As the demands of everyday parenting change, new themes are bound to come up in my work. It is an open-ended series.
LIFE IN THE SAND CASTLE (80 x 100 cm) £495
Australian Family Holidaying On The Beach In The 1950s
Painting for the cover of a book by Marie Porter
Marie Porter is a lecturer in Motherhood Studies in Brisbane in Australia. She has used paintings from my Motherhood Series before in lectures and for conferences. On this occasion she asked me if I had a painting about the myths surrounding parenting in the 50s that she could for the cover of her book. At the time of writing (June 2008), her book is about to be published. The title is: 'Transformative Power in Motherwork: A Study of Mothering in the 1950s and 1960s.
For the cover of her book she needed an image that reflected the myths about how mothering was supposed to be in the 50s, yet hinted at the flip side of the coin. She told me that most of the women she interviewed had had a family holiday on the beach every year, which is an Australian custom. The images of domestic perfection caused a lot of women angst because they found that the reality of marriage and motherhood did not live up to those images..
And so I did a painting of a 50s family on the beach. Dad is in the background because fathers had the role of breadwinners in those days. Mother were left to get on with the twin jobs of homemaking and raising children. In my painting the family is building a sandcastle on the beach. This sandcastle becomes a dollhouse where the family reappears in miniature and here we see the flip side of the myth of 50s perfection! There is laundry everywhere, two kids are fighting and babysister crawls off on an adventure while Mum tries to restore peace.
In the painting I have mirrored the way that the mother holds the baby in the way her daughter holds her doll. This is to convey the notion of the 'great alchemy of parenthood': our children make us parents but one day our children grow up, become independent and often become parents themselves. We pass on a lot of ourselves in the way we parent but most of all we learn from our children, they are our teachers in many ways. This is the great transformation that takes place in good 'motherwork' (to use word Marie has coined) and what this book is about.
Family Fortunes Series
The Family Fortunes Series picks up where the Motherhood Series 'ends'. It's about the dynamics of a growing family, the dynamics of dysfunctional families, about love, loyalty and 'the Labours of Eve'!
THE FALL (80x 100 cm) £450
Things happen in life that make you stop in your tracks and reassess. Losing a parent, serious illness, losing a job.
This picture is about that feeling of 'needing a break from yourself'. About removing your head and putting it aside for a while, to have a break from going around in the circles of your own thoughts
FAMILY TIES £150
MY WORST ENEMY, MYSELF £150
This painting is about a feeling that I think many people will recognise. Not infrequently do I feel that I am my own worst enemy! I fall victim to perfectionism, to repeating the same patterns of thought and behaviour over and over. Sometimes I have to make an effort to 'reprogramme myself', as it were.
MENOMINEE DOLLS FOR FAITHFULNESS
The Menominee People were a Native American tribe.They made dolls that served to keep husband and wife faithful to each other! (Our society might benefit from this particular kind of doll making. What about evening classes in 'making dolls for faithfulness'?!
Visit the NATIVE AMERICAN page to see more paintings inspired by the Native American worldview and concepts!
Last, but not least, talking about faithfulness and happy marriages:
ROADMAP TO A HAPPY MARRIAGE
It has become a tradition to give a painting with this title to everyone in our family or circle of friends on their wedding day. This particular painting was made for my cousin who got married on Friday April 13th this year!
For more personalised paintings and paintings for specials occasions, please visit the Commissions Page!
Motherhood art, family life paintings, Yi: Poetic Description of a Pregnancy, Spirits Souls & Spirit Masters, Aurora Borealis and stillborn children, Sedna or Neqivik: the Sea Keeper, birth control, My Own Worst Enemy, The Before Life, Under My Wing, Sea Keeper: Sedna or Neqivik, City Child, the Labours of Eve, parenting in paintings, parenthood images, 'bump to bump' friendships, umbilical cords, Saudada, yearning, infertitlity, 'Wonder Woman', Virginia Hausegger, embryos, potential, Torschlusspanik (Gate Closing Panic), Adoption, Family Life Images, dysfunctional families, Family Ties, 'My Own Worst Enemy' , Menominee Dolls for Faithfulness, Roadmap for a Happy Marriage
IMELDA ALMQVIST ART: JOURNEYS TO OTHER WORLDS, INNER WORLDS AND AROUND THE WORLD IN PAINTINGS!
