This is the truth

My mother, Jennifer Grace Watt, painted this picture and sold it at an art auction benefitting the UofA art museum. Dad, Brendan, Mom and I walked around the art museum across from the Center for Creative Photography. We ate the catered Mexican food and admired the beautiful, the eccentric, the downright ugly artwork that hung on the walls. One piece sold for over $1,000. It was half the size of most paintings and was a wash of two different greens...that is all. Only green on canvas, something I could have done with my eyes closed, holding a ridiculously long paintbrush with my teeth and painting from across the room. How ridiculous! The art world bemuses me at times. There was one piece, a painting of a water lily flower or gardenia, painted with oils, still glistening with fresh paint that held me captivated. It almost looked alive, as if moved by the wind and shining in the sun's rays with vibrant colors and depth. I wanted to buy it, but it sold for $200 or so. Many paintings, drawings, sold for $30, $70 or $80. My mom's mixed media painting, drawn from a photo of a native american woman and altered to represent the depictions of Mary from Renaissance art was titled simply, "Madonna" and sold for $100.

Sitting at the kitchen island surrounded by colored pencils, gouache, pencils, paintbrushes, my mom had worked on the painting for hours. Bess and I even pitched in at the sketching level to make sure the upper right hand edges of the pot were symmetrical. When I look at this painting, I see my mom with the sun illuminating behind her back as she leans over the art in progress. She is content and engrossed in the motion of her own hands, the shapes and colors forming and blending before her. At that moment, I see my mom over a succession of years, when I was five, seven, twelve, fifteen, twenty, creating beauty at every stage of her life and throughout every stage of mine. A self portrait that hung in her apartment is what inspired my dad to meet her for the first time.

And it makes me sad that she has lost her dream to be a famous artist. And it makes me sad that she struggles to make time to create even a little piece of art. Does it count that she is famous to me?