Misstropolis

Tuesday, May 06, 2008

Motherhood and New Perceptions of Beauty

by Robin Hauck

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Throughout history, critics and doubters perpetuated a notion that motherhood and Art don’t mix, that the life of a mother can not support the life of an artist, even that women should make babies, not art.

It led Alicia Ostriker to write in her feisty essay “A Wild Surmise: Motherhood and Poetry” The advantage of motherhood for a woman artist is that it puts her in immediate and inescapable contract with the sources of life, death, beauty, growth and corruption… As our knowledge begins to accumulate, we can imagine what it would signify to all women, and men, to live in a culture where child-birth and mothering occupied the kind of position that sex and romantic love have occupied in literature and art for the last five hundred years, or the kind of position that warfare has occupied since literature began.“

How invigorating to meet women whose lives abolish that preposterous notion.

Nancy Popper is a printmaker who lives in Cambridge, MA with her husband and two sons. Popper makes prints which evoke a femininity simultaneously delicate and hardened, vulnerable and wise. A sophisticated sense of humor plays out in the dark lines and bursts of bright color etched on copper plates and made into prints or illustrations.

She is clear about the impact motherhood has had on her work.

“Since my children came along, my relationship to making art has changed. When my boys were really young, I was constantly asking myself how I could ever create anything as amazing and beautiful as they were. For a while, art seemed completely insignificant - I would look at my prints and wonder why I ever made them. As I’ve come back to printmaking over the past few years, it has been like rediscovering a part of myself - a part that I only now realized I missed terribly. My more recent prints are more playful, even more hopeful than previous work.“

Published in magazines such as The New Yorker and The Boston Globe Magazine, Poppers’ characters fascinate the reader much in the way a Giacometti sculpture does - by offering an alternative way of seeing, irresistibly compelling in their restraint and suggestiveness. This alternative way of seeing, a new perception of beauty as she describes it, was partly due to becoming a mother, and partly a result of living outside of the U.S..

Popper spent much of her childhood in Europe and admits to having adopted a “very European aesthetic” even through her college career at Bard where she majored in painting. Her real artistic awakening came after that, during two years teaching art and printmaking in Japan, at the invitation of a national art college in Kanazawa.

Once her European mindset relaxed, Popper became more and more enchanted with the Japanese way of seeing. She recalls at first being baffled by Japanese students talking passionately about tea ceremonies and flower arranging. But it didn’t take long to understand the power of those ancient traditions. The Japanese students helped her appreciate the zen in their worldview. Arranging flowers was like a yoga exercise she explains. Each movement was carefully thought out and appreciated. The culture of Japan became the culture of her artistic expression. Her art changed, she changed and she has maintained a strong aesthetic connection to the East ever since.

After two years Popper returned to the states to get married, go to graduate school and eventually have children. Her sons, now seven and ten have an indescribable, inseparable influence on her art.

People have commented that the work is “happier” since she became a mother, she says, laughing.

“I think that reflects a new perception of beauty, inspired by my children and my experience mothering them.”

This summer, Popper is teaching at the Charles River Creative Arts Program at the Charles River School in Dover. To see more of her prints and illustrations visit nancypopper.com.