Breaking Through

Breaking Through speaks to this time in my life; moving from motherhood as primary position in not only my life, but in the lives of my children as well. They leave the nest, come back and leave again. Only to repeat the visits again in the yoyo that college brings us all. And then they leave for good, as my engaged son has. Or, they come back for awhile, as my daughter has, only to plan when she can leave again. This series of nest paintings has come out of all this turmoil. The nest representing all that comes with the family unit changing, morphing into some other structure that I do not quite have a handle on yet. And through all of this grey uncertainty I have become a stronger artist...I have begun to remember who the person I was in college as I painted late into the nights in the art building. I am having "ah hah!" moments as I work and as I blog about this time in a mom's life known as the "Empty Nest". While it is heartbreaking at times (oh, how I miss them!), it is also exhilerating to be free to travel, work, and let go of the every day minutiae of everyone else's lives. Breaking Through is speaking to that realization: that this empty nest, with all of it's heartache, actually brings with it a freedom that I'd forgotten about completely. The boundaries and duties are at last being broken through and dropped by the wayside so that my art, my career, my self can finally be freed to explore my next phase in life.