Honoring My Mother

Colláge art, the process of randomly cutting and pasting commercial and artistic images, employs the primal intuitive and can wonderfully tap into the subconscious with its vivid mood and collision of imagery.  For over two years now I have been part of a group that takes on this practice, called Soul Colláge. I have easily created over a hundred colláges in this period of time, and have found the practice extraordinarily transformative. 

This practice also includes honoring those in your life who have had profound impact. And as we commemorate Mother’s Day this year, I’d like to share the colláge I made for my mother, Martha Brown Hicks, who passed away six years ago.

She lived for beautiful things. She loved her DaVincis and her Michaelangos, and often sat for hours in a tufted chair, beside a Belle Epoque floor lamp, with her head buried in a book about the works in the Louvre. She once came back from a trip to Paris and had brought me a print of a Millet, a rural landscape with the portrait of a farm girl. My mother had seen the original in the Musée d’Orsay, and had been stupefied and in wonder and awe over how much the peasant girl’s face was MY face.  And with great abandon and wild verve, and with the belief that usually only a child has the power to generate, she proceeded to tell me how I MUST have lived in another lifetime in Paris, and had been painted by all the local artists who’d ever crossed my path. My mother had that about her. A sense of whimsy and imagination, and a belief in fairies and magic, that she fully invested in. A kind of loopiness and a romping in the stars that, in my opinion, was her loveliest quality.   

Her smile was often a strain in photographs, as if it belied a melancholy, but was larger and brighter than the sun when it was unconscious and in the present moment. There is a photograph included in this colláge that captures that unconscious, radiant smile. It is my favorite. She had visited Italy, and it is a snapshot of her being serenaded by a waiter in a restaurant.  The smile is equal parts ecstatic joy at the wooing attention, and giddy embarrassment (but the good kind!) of making such a public, lust-for-life scene. 

Honor your mothers and yourselves.

Have lust for life.  Believe in fairies.