If you are in the Toronto area, you don't want to miss this amazing primal mothering art exhibit! Artist and mother, Amanda Greavette, creates life-size, large scale figure paintings of women, narrating stories of identity transformation and relationship shifts. Her subjects are often in the process of becoming mothers - pregnant, laboring, or fresh with a newborn. Greavette's decorative and richly painted backgrounds illustrate the beauty and intensity of this monumental life change and provide context for the experiences of the figures. In the paintings, the female body is both powerful and vulnerable, and the stories they tell are both real and fantastic.
In her artist statement, Greavette notes:
I'm interested in how women navigate the dramatic process of childbearing and how it shapes and changes their identity. I aim to create work that is provocative, beautiful and heavy with emotion and symbol. The paintings represent an intensely personal but simultaneously universal and ageless experience. Much beauty and drama is lived through a woman's body, in ways that can be both empowering and debilitating. The pieces I make have a narrative that unfolds according to the viewers' own experiences, but also represent aspects of the larger story of women's history. I hope women can see their own stories mimicked in the paintings, as well as emotions, beliefs and experiences they may not be able to express or fully explain.
Greavette graduated in 2004 with a BFA from the Ontario College of Art and Design in Toronto. Since 2005 she has been exhibiting regularly in both group and solo shows. Greavette is mom to three little ones, ages 6, 3 1/2, and 21 months. She is currently expecting her fourth baby in April 2011. A peaceful parenting reader who knows Greavette well added that she is, "a wonderful attachment parenting mother, La Leche League leader, founder of our local Friends of Muskoka Midwives group, and is now using her art to show the beauty of birth to the public." In The Birth Project, Greavette accepts mothers' photos from their own births to turn into magnificent masterpieces.
If you can make it down to Gallery 1313 in Toronto, Ontario, this week or next, take advantage of this outstanding opportunity to breathe in some of Greavette's amazing work.
The Birth Project (blog)
“Living in the Body" November 4-14
Gallery 1313
1313 Queen Street West.
Toronto
Toronto
Gallery Hours: Wed-Sun 1-6pm
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i am overjoyed to see that you have posted this. many of these paintings are of my sister and the birth of my sweet nephew. i was honored to be there to share the experience of the birth and amazed at how amanda (who was also there) turned the images from that day into these massive works that feel soo intense and beautiful.
ReplyDeletethese paintings are life size works of the mosaic body, and i suggest everybody to see them.
These images seem to capture everything that is beautiful about becoming a mother... There are definitely intense and very intimate feelings involved in the pictures. I have to visit the exhibition as soon as possible
ReplyDeleteoh my... simply stunning!!
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