I started this painting in 1994. The first thing I did was to crumple up a piece of paper, and instead of drawing it, I painted it almost in the center of this long canvas. It didn't turn out the way I wanted it, because I was just practicing, and had planned to jumble together a variety of images, in black and white and light blue. At the time, I was feeling shock and grief, over the diagnosis of autism that my three-year-old had just received. Black, white and blue seemed fitting. I decided to try painting her face. I wasn't very skilled at faces yet, but I needed to work on it, so I painted just her face, from a picture I have of her, at around fourteen months. In the photo, she is sitting near a window, surrounded by books, with this utterly blank look on her face. It was chilling for me. I touched that face up, many times over the years, until I felt it was good enough. Faces are difficult, especially when you haven't practiced a lot, and I really had not. For years, the floating baby face sat perched atop the crumpled paper. Many other things have surrounded them...more practice. Eventually I painted over the bottom half in straight black, and loved this effect. On the top part, I had done leaves hanging from a tree, that just didn't work at all. What is interesting to me about the process of this painting, is that all along I was trying to solve problems of balance and composition, without much thought to the actual content. I solved the problem of the lame, chunky leaves, by surrounding the face with more of them, and adding the little vein-like lines. It brought it together in a way I'd been looking for for a long time, but everything was very outlined and separate. I did a white wash over the edges, which I felt gave a look of radiating light. At that point, I thought I might be done, and just let it be for a while, hung on my bedroom wall. When my husband and I were first married, he thought it was creepy. So is autism.I knew the bottom half needed something, but I wasn't sure, what. It occured to me that filigree, very enlarged, bold filigree, would be just what I needed. I just keep remembering the fear I felt back then. I was afraid to draw on top of the crumpled paper bit, because it had been so hard for me to paint. It took forever for me to finally draw out the filigree and then paint it, but I was pleased. The design was not pre-planned. Once in, I realized it was too far to the right, and needed something to fill in on the left. I liked painting vines, and thought it would be nice to weave it through. Again, all of these things were incredibly challenging for me, at that time. It wasn't until I started the vines that I thought to connect the vines to the filigree, as if one were blending and becoming the other.
The time period when I began this painting, was when my daughter was very young, and was getting behavioral therapy, in my living room, over forty hours a week. I had a desperate feeling of having to "fix" her. It was an obsession. I was reading books about autism until 2:00am, and then supervising my program in the morning, and ended up on the phone with other parents, and was very involved with the board of a non-profit organization supporting autism causes. The culture at that time, told us mothers that if we just worked hard enough, we could save them. I gave it my best shot, and I can rest easy now. At the time, however, the filigree turning into the vines, reflected my desire to mechanically teach my child to be organic. I wanted to force her into the mechanics of living, through behaviorism. I was going to pull her, kicking and screaming, into my world. I was going to give birth to her...again.
It wasn't until I thought I had finished, and was looking for a name, that I saw it...actually, I think someone pointed it out to me...that it looked like an embryo. The name came to me immediately, and I added the rose, for a little heart. The fruit of the efforts...the reflection of hope...and a nice color focal point.
When my daughter looks at the painting, now, at nineteen, she knows what it is about. She has been told it has to do with my feelings about raising a child with autism. She looks at it and says, "Yes, it's very nice."
It was finished in 2004.
http://www.katrinaernst.com/
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