The Juggling Act

When I wrote my first blog post in 2021, just as I was launching my business, I had big ideas about posting my musings on studio happenings on a somewhat regular basis. I had even made some internal commitments to perhaps writing something monthly, maybe more, if inspiration struck. You’ll have noted, if you found your way to this post via my blog page, that that first post was my only, hanging out, friendless, in cyberspace.

Time, as the idioms suggest, is fleeting.

The past four years seem to have rushed past me in much the same way that a train that isn’t pulling into your station might. All in a blurry sudden, whipping past me, almost lifting me off my feet. And then, just as soon as it came, over and gone. In reality, a lot has gone on but it’s hard to put my finger on the specifics. When I sit down and think hard, I know, amongst much else, these six key things happened:-

1.        I launched my business

2.        I sold my first (and many subsequent) paintings

3.        I taught my first (and many subsequent) classes

4.        I grew my audience

5.        I met and befriended many kind and wonderful artists

6.        I made the switch in my medium; from acrylics to oils

My work has changed a lot during this time – my portraits have become both more experimental and more traditional in different ways. As my skills continued to build – and particularly as I made the transition from acrylic paint to oils, which allowed me more time and precision in my work – I found my portraits becoming more concerned with being accurate recreations of people, rather than pieces of art. I can’t lie and say that there isn’t a certain satisfaction to be found in creating a portrait that could almost be a photograph, but it was, on the whole, dull and void of that particular fizziness I feel when I make something that feels like Art with a capital A.

The bouncing off from this led me to a more experimental phase, bright, exposed grounds contrasting against skin tones; an obsession with abstracted flowers intertwined with sitters; faces appearing and disappearing. It all sort of felt that it was ramping up somewhere until life, as it does, waved its big old hand and tapped its proverbial watch and I remembered three other key things that had happened since 2021:-

1.        I got married

2.        I turned 30

3.        I was expecting my first baby

The third item on this list was the most pressing and, in October 2024, burst (both figuratively and literally) the artistic bubble I had been living in. Real life had come knocking and eventually we answered the door to a tiny pink shouty little guy who was about to turn our lives upside down and inside out.

It’s a cliché for a reason that there is no way to understand how entirely all-encompassing a baby is until you have one. There isn’t a love like it. I vividly recall holding my brand new son in the hospital in the early hours of the morning after his late-night birth and studying every part of his face. How was he real? How did we make him? How could a baby so perfect possibly exist? (Hint: oxytocin and the fact he hadn’t quite realised he’d been born yet played a big part in this).

There also isn’t a exhaustion like it. Throw in a traumatic birth, an unexpected c-section recovery and a baby who doesn’t consider sleep to be a necessity and you have a recipe for one very tired self-employed artist. I returned to work when he was just six weeks old but what this really meant was rushing into the studio to teach a class before rushing back home to feed the baby before I exploded (breast feeding was another thing I hadn’t fully understood the intensity of before I started it). The juggling act of trying to raise a healthy and happy baby while keeping a business going and still feeling some kind of artistic spark is a tough one - and I’ve never been very good at juggling in the first place. I’ve generally always been a bit of an all-or-nothing person and I suppose I had some kind of vision of a serene baby who would sleep or happily lie down and coo whilst I continued to work the same way I always had. Apparently this isn’t a type of baby that exists.

The first six months of my son’s life have been a constant stream of trains rushing past my station. I blinked and my soft pink squidgy son was a chunky and fairly robust little boy, teeth already cutting through.

Time, as I hadn’t always appreciated, is a thief.

It’s only now that I’m really starting to take stock of what life as an artist with a child might look like. Or, rather, what kind of art I want to be making now when so much of my life – and myself – has changed. It had been suggested to me throughout my pregnancy that I would become a baby artist once my son arrived. The idea amused me – imagining a studio filled with chubby baby faces but, even before I gave birth, I knew that I was never going to be a person whose identity would be tied up with being a mother. I had sort of expected that by some kind of magic I would feel like ‘A Mum’ when I held my son but – while I adored him from the start – I didn’t, and still don’t, feel like A Mum. I’m still just Ellie, just with a little guy in tow. Ellie ft. Freddie.

So what does Ellie ft. Freddie make? I’m still figuring that out. It’s still portraits but I’m entering a phase of experimentation to work out exactly what these are going to look like. I’m trying to take the pressure off of myself (there’s enough of that with a tiny little person who relies on me to live) and just let myself figure out what it is that I want to make. Not for anyone else; not for Instagram; not because it’s what I think might be more artistically ‘valid’ (whatever that means); and not because it has to be something perfect in order for me to justify its existence. I’m excited to find out what this is going to be.

Hopefully, if you watch this space, and you can find out with me.