The Shadow Of A Hat
This is a 6″x6″ mixed media painting on paper covered canvas. The sides are 1.5″ deep and are painted red,
This painting is $65 and is available HERE.
This is another nameless mug shot from 1900. This one is from my home town of Victoria, so I have actually walked the same streets she walked … well, not exactly.
maria@mariapacewynters.com
She’s Just A Little Girl
This is a 6″x12″ mixed media painting on clayboard. The sides are painted red with newsprint butterflies and are 2″ deep.
This painting is SOLD
This is something that I have to remind myself often. Especially when it comes to my seven-year old, I find it much easier to remember when it comes to my four-year old. I always have. I have always expected more from Imogen. When I look back on what I expected from her when she was four I kind of cringe. I guess this the curse of being the oldest and born to an older mother who was set in her ways perhaps, and had way to long to build those expectations. You know what I mean. The times when we would see children in public and think, “if they were my kids ….” (fill in the black with all of your ‘non parent’ wisdom HERE). Or, on the other side of that, when I was trying to have a child unsuccessfully for five LONG years and I would see a mother or father completely ignoring their kid begging for gum as they were standing in the line to buy groceries and I would think “NEVER! I will NEVER ignore my children, I will talk to them, I always engage them in stimulating and meaningful conversation”. I didn’t realize that they weren’t ignoring their kids they were simply WORN OUT. They can do that, you know, after the 100th time or begging for something in the grocery store, that DOES tend to happen.
This all being said, I must remember she is just a little girl more often. I know that I am a good mother, but I could be better. Couldn’t we all? I was watching TV making dinner the other day (yes, I have a TV in my kitchen! I know, I know) and I saw the worst thing I have ever seen on TV. I am not going to mention the show but it was basically about a mother abusing her child in the most horrific and twisted unimaginable way, and this is the stuff we were privy to. And the first thing I thought of was ‘ he is just a little boy’ and then I had to turn it off because it made me ache so bad that a child would have to endure anything like this from his own mother. What hope does a child in this situation have?
And as bad as this was, I have to tell you, it doesn’t have to be THAT abusive to have long-term scaring effects on a child. How about a teacher that tells a child in front of their peers that they will be getting a bad report card if they don’t start behaving? Don’t think that kind of shaming isn’t going to have a negative effect on a child. Unfortunately for the child and teacher, probably an immediate effect.
Anyway, I was just thinking about all of this when I was painting this one and I know what I have wrote it is a bit rambling but really what I am trying to say is those words ‘shes just a little girl’ were circling around my head but what I was thinking about was ‘they are just children’ and they are really delicate and we have so much power over them. We all just really need to remember to be kind.
Aspirations
This is a mixed media diptych on wood.
The sides are 1″ deep and are turquoise.
SOLD
Painting, painting, painting….eating it, breathing it, living it …. these are my aspirations…but they are tiring.
Fancy Plumage
This is a 12″x12″ mixed media painting on clayboard.
Hey, what is that peeking over the side?
The Usual Wear And Tear
This is a 6″x8.5″ mixed media painting on paper.
When I was painting this one, this expression was circling my head. I guess I was still thinking about being a single woman during the turn of the century and the possibility of marrying being a pretty slim prospect after a certain age.
Just to think about how great I am now in comparison to how great I wasn’t in my twenties make me think that men, even in this day, are kind of dumb. (Not my husband of course, he is brilliant).
Available here
Connie Crow (Tentative Start)
12″x16″ mixed media painting on clay board
$300 + shipping.
To purchase click HERE
Connie Crow was one of the Crow sisters. I can’t remember the the name of the other two sisters.
OK, I am fairly sure that Connie Crow did not look like this. Actually I am 100% sure that she didn’t but I hey, that is what they call artistic license. I am a card carrying member and not only is the membership free, there is no expiry date on the card.
That aside, I was thinking about the Crow sisters and how they never married and why that was. All three of them. I guess it is not so strange but I can’t help it and I know it sounds so needy and not very modern but whenever I meet an old woman that never married I wonder why. Choice? Fate? Tragedy? It is not such a strange thing now a days but back in the turn of the 18th century and into the early to mid 1900’s it was pretty much expected that you are going to marry. So many didn’t however. If they had wanted to and never found a companion, or (as I know was the case for many) were obligated to stay and look after their siblings or relatives because the Mother had died, it is so sad. If they were not going to put up with any MAN telling them how to live their life , then GREAT on them. I am just CURIOUS as to why.
When I was growing up in the Guesthouse, before my parents converted it into a B&B, there were many people that had lived there for decades. They were all single, and before you get any wild ideas, really old. Not all of them never married, some were widows/ers or divorcees (this I am only assuming, as it was not something that people spoke freely of back then, especially in front of a seven year old). Perhaps this is where my curiosity stems from. I wanted to know these people’s stories but as a child could never ask. Now the answers are gone forever.
Miss. Gregg and Miss. Roberts were two women that lived in the Guesthouse that never married.
Miss Gregg was a retired grade one school teacher that was so wonderfully kind to me. She wore her soft white hair in a bun, was completely bent over ( and I mean completely), was in her nineties and had elephantiasis. None of these things stopped her from climbing the two flights of stairs to her room at the top of the house at least three times a day. Unlike many of the tourist that would stay in her room years later, she never complained. Not about the stairs and certainly not about the size of her room. She lived in that room for decades and it was crammed with trunks ,books and in my mind as a child, mystery and treasure. She was so good with children it always made me sad that she never had any of her own.
She used to say great things like ‘many hands make light work’ as we would set the tables together, she would pinch her cheeks ‘just to add a little colour’ and her drink of choice was teoffee, a blend of coffee and tea. (Nobody is perfect).
Miss Roberts was the pampered daughter of a Sea Captain. She couldn’t have been more different than Miss Greg. Miss Greg was a lady in every way. Estelle, was not. She was kind of lazy and loved to lounge in her room looking at ‘movie magazines’ and eating chocolates. She wasn’t really interested in me, I am not sure I really existed in her world which was fine with me as I found her slightly frightening. Perhaps here is where I should mention that she looked rather a lot like the sea hag from Popeye when she didn’t wear her teeth, which was most of the time as she lost them or forgot them often. Most frequently she would take them out at the dinner table,wrapping them up in her napkin, I am guessing as an attempt to not offend her dinner companions and then, placing her napkin in her lap she would promptly forget where she put them. When she would get up at the end of her meal she would either leave them behind in her napkin which would mean routing around in the garbage a few hours later looking for her teeth or her napkin would fall on the ground and out her teeth would roll onto the dining room floor for everyone to see. So much for not offending her dinner companions.
Miss Greg had no time for her and would angrily shake her head and say “Oh! Estelle!” as if she was talking to one of her six year old students. Miss Roberts didn’t give one care. She may have had ripped stockings and a slip that hung haphazardly down below her skirt but she did have spunk.
What was she like when she was young? One can only wonder. I don’t know why she never married. She couldn’t have always looked like the Sea Hag ( hey funny that her dad was a Sea Captain!) or like my mother would say had a face like the map of Girbaltar. You really have never seen so many wrinkles but on another note, have you ever heard this expression? I just made myself laugh out loud typing it.
My Irish mother has the craziest expressions that she always qualifies first by saying ‘ as my mother would say’. I guess I just did that as well, so I guess I am keeping that alive.
But some of these expressions are not very PC and may be better off forgotten. Sometimes I don’t even know what they mean before they come out of my mouth.
Once I said ‘I almost split my kipper’ to a boyfriend’s mother because I had almost slipped and fallen down. Now, this wasn’t one of my mother’s expressions but she had told me numerous times about her friend who when after saving herself from a slip had exclaimed this. I just never put two and two together, not until the words were being formed and leaving my mouth and heading directly toward my boyfriend’s mother’s ears. It was like a light bulb went on and it was suddenly crystal clear exactly what that expression meant and why my mother had retold it so many times. She didn’t think it was funny, what she thought was it was in unbelievably bad taste. It was too late. It was out there. Now I will be the one that will be thought of as having unbelievably bad taste because as bad as it was coming out of my mouth, I at least hadn’t qualified it with; ‘as my mother would say’.
Three Sisters
OK, so there were three crow sisters, not two. One died a few years before the other two.
I was thinking about this while I was painting today. I was thinking about how close those three sisters were. Living together all those years. Sharing their lives for over eight decades. What must it have been like to watch your sister go. What must it have been like to be the last one left? Sometimes life is so sad that I can’t even bare it.
I was also thinking about crows and how they share their life with one partner. Birds are often like this, aren’t they? monogamous. Maybe it is my Catholic up bringing but when ever I hear about animals that are monogamous I feel even more of an affinity to them. Kind of silly, I guess.
Crows will also do this very strange kind of memorial service for a crow that has been killed. They will all gather for a moment of silence and then disperse. Without a sound.
I am sure you have seen a crow standing at the side of the road looking down at his dead kin. I have even seen them prod them gently with his beak as if to try to get them to move. I have always been touched by this seen. There was no doubt in my mind that I was witnessing immense grief in this animal.
This new painting is about all of these things. Companionship. Grief. Ghosts. It is in progress.
We are are here, and then we are gone.
Sorry for being so morbid today. I don’t mean to be a downer.
The Roots of Wallpaper and Patterns
Crow With Art Deco Wallpaper
6″x24″
mixed media on clayboard (sides are painted red)
I have written before about my love of wallpaper. I think that it stems from the 17 room B & B hotel that my parents run in Victoria.
I was seven when we first moved into what we call the Guesthouse. There were many rooms in this three story 1913 Arts and Crafts house and most were wallpapered. My dad refreshed many of these rooms with new wallpaper (remember, this was the seventies so wallpaper was very popular). There were different textures, patterns and colours, all of which I was fascinated by.
The front hallway of the guest house has an amazing floral print with black background. It reminds me very much of the Art deco wallpaper I have painted in the above piece.
Once again, I can not help but return to the ghosts of my past. The stuff that fills our senses at such a young age, that stuff sticks with us and forms who we are with out our even realizing. The problem for me now is that I realize that and every time something happens to Imogen or Scarlett I think “How is that going to shape them? What will that do them as a forty year old woman? What will they be remembering?”
Wallpaper, back to the wall paper.
My dad wallpapered my entire room in baroque pink. It was an attic room so he even did the ceiling!
He was/is good at wallpaper. He taught me how. One winter we wallpapered all the bathrooms in the guesthouse in various stripes. It was fun and I got pretty good at it. Another time we wallpapered the ceiling of the front room with embossed wallpaper; NOT so fun.
I remember, on a trip to Orcas Island when I was around twelve, lying on my bed at The Outlook Inn, drawing the wallpaper. It was raining so hard that we had to stay in. I think that it rained all that weekend but I did have a full colour representation of our hotel room’s wallpaper by the end of it.
It is funny because I am not much for prints or patterns on my clothing. I like solids.
In my paintings, however, I love patterns. People will tell me it reminds them of Matisse. And as much as I love Matisse, and I do, it is my mother who has blessed me with my fascination of prints. Her style can only be described as eclectic. She manages to put together a hundred different prints in one room and make it looks fabulous. She loves it, so it goes. It is as pure as that. No swatches to match this with that at the fabric store. She decorates with her heart and her rooms reflect that. They are as comfortable and warm as being wrapped up in her arms, pressed so close to her bosom that you can hear her heart beat.
Collage Crow
7″x9.5″Mixed media painting on paper
This little guy has parts another painting (that wasn’t working as a whole but that I just loved parts of) collaged into it.
I might do this again. I quite like the results.
The Little Red Crow
3″x5″ mixed media on canvas
In Earnest …
12″x6″ mixed media painting on clyaboard
$200 US + $5 shipping
‘Dew’ (my three year old named her).
‘She wasn’t use to be being told no. Not ever and certainly not now.
How dare he! Well, he would be sorry. He was not match for her big liquid eyes, parted lips, porcelain skin and soft curls.
Watch out! Stand Back! She was just about to get her own way.’
The above is describing my painting but could easily be describing my three year old as well. Go figure!
Rose Red
5.5″x6.5″ mixed media painting on paper.
SOLD
October 15,2009
I was asked to write about this one, so I am coming back to it a few days later.
When I was little I got this old fairy tale book that had some obscure stories as well as some more familiar ones. I don’t remember what the book was called but one of the stories was about two sisters, Snow White ( who was fair) and Rose Red (who was dark). I remember it really struck me because up until then I always knew of the classic Disney Snow White, who was dark. My mum used to say that when I was asleep I looked like Snow White because I had very dark hair, very pale skin. So when I read this new story, I once again felt a kin to Rose Red and instantly she became a favorite.
The other day when I was painting this piece, I began by making her hair dark and when I did the name ‘Rose Red’ popped into my head. The whole time I painted it I was thinking of this story, the book, and my connection to the character. I wanted her hair to be blue black ( a colour my Grandmother’s hair was often described as), her lips, cherry red and her skin porcelain (like mine used to be).
This is my version of Rose Red from that old fairy Tale.
Trust Me
5.5x 8.5 mixed media painting
SOLD
Trust me
Just Jump
don’t look down
If you jump with honesty
you will always find yourself on solid ground
I am on my second year of jumping with honesty. I am not sure where my new paintings are taking me. I can’t stop changing but I can’t stop.
The last little while I have felt as though someone else has taken the wheel and I can barely catch my breath as I am whirled along at break neck speed.
Can’t I just stay and do these for a little while longer?
No, we have to keep moving.
Will I ever do these again?
Uncertain, maybe, but never the same way.
Hmmm, this makes me sad but at the same time I guess this would always be true and king of reassuring. This seems right. Deep down this is the right answer.
Forced to continue to grow.
OK, I will go for the ride. I am curious to see what is next.
As long as I am going with honesty, I am willing to take that jump.
Red Heads …LOVE TO PAINT THEM
Don’t Look Away
16″x12″ mixed media painting on clayboard profile stretcher (sides are painted scarlet).
$400 US+ shipping
Please contact me availability (maria@mariapacewynters.com)
The women that I have been painting as of late are definitely a little homage to Klimt and even Toulouse-Lautrec … they both loved big haired red heads! I have often mentioned how much I love to paint red hair. My daughter, Imogen, whom I use as a model quite frequently, often scowls at me (like only a six year old can) and protests:
” Mum! My hair is NOT red!”. (Imagine hands on hips, eyes rolling around her head, lips twisted, nose crinkled.)
I won’t be surprise if she doesn’t dye her hair when she gets older. It isn’t that I don’t like other hair colours but I find in a painting red hair is so powerful! Black and brown can look a little flat, blonde can take on green tones. But red … ORANGE …. it just POPS. I lo-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-Ve it.
Oh, and I really love this clayboard material this painting is on. It is especially made for mixed media. Great for drawing on, scratching into, collage on, painting on! It is awesome. Also, the stretcher is museum quality. Just beautifully made. The aren’t cheap but boy are they worth it.
Thomas –
This is a 11.5″x15.5″ mixed media portrait on 100% rag paper.
Today when I was going to pick up my oldest daughter from the School bus, my three year old was wearing the most interesting ensemble. Tan cords, brown leather knee high boots, a pink tee and a tan faux lambswool coat. Sounds fine except I have neglected to mention the pink princess dress and a pointy princess hat (pink of course) with flowing veil.
KIDS DO LOVE TO DRESS UP!
Here is Thomas. He also loves to dress up. Over half of the reference photos I was sent to paint his portrait were of him dressed either as Batman or Superman. It was his mother’s idea to have him wearing a cape and I instantly thought it would be great.
I chose Superman strictly because of colour. ( I do like red.) Personally, when it comes to superheros no one can hold a candle to Aquaman. Perhaps because he is mainly under water. ( Get it? hold a candle? … under water? … ha, ha … geesh … tough crowd).
However, I am not sure if Thomas even knows who Aquaman is. Is he still around, I don’t have boys so I don’t know. I am fairly certain that he never wore a cape, it just wouldn’t have been practical. I do know but I have always been partial to the fair haired male (except you Mr. Depp, you are fine as you are) and perhaps this is where me liking Aquaman stemmed from, OR PERHAPS, (OMG) me liking fair haired men stemmed from Aquaman!
Now that I think of it, I do remember when I was five, watching Super Friends while my Mum made dinner, standing in front of the TV, eating a raw carrot and crushing on Aquaman. It is one of those weird vivid memories that up until now seemed so insignificant. Perhaps, he was my first crush! WOW.
Hey,come to think of it, do you think Aquaman looks like Chris?
Dummies
5″x7″ Mixed media painting on Paper.
SOLD
I watch way too much TV, I will be honest, but there are few programs that I actually enjoy watching.
I LOVE WATCHING PROJECT RUNWAY!
It is so much fun to watch and it is a show that Chris loves too, so we watch it is a couple.
I really love fashion and at one time in my life, really wanted to be a fashion designer/costume designer.
Didn’t happen, can’t sew worth a bean (and boy can these people sew!). So I live vicariously through them via reality TV. Works for me!
Speaking of Reality TV, have you heard of Star Portrait? My mum was telling me about it. It sounds fabulous. Right up my ally! Anyway, I haven’t watched it but plan on it. It is on Bravo and three portrait artists have two weeks to finish a portrait of a famous Canadian.
(YES, THERE ARE SO FAMOUS CANADIANS!)
I like the fact that it is not set up like big brother. Can you imagine a whole bunch of portrait artist living in a house together for weeks on end? No?
ARTIST #1: Did you see the way she painted his nose! Who the hell does she think she is!
ARTIST #2: Ya, well I heard that she only cleans her paint water once a week.
ARTIST #1 NO!
Not exactly riveting stuff.
Come Hither
5″x7″ mixed media painting on paper SOLD
Girl On A Train
This is a 5″x7″ mixed media painting on paper.
This morning as Imogen ate her hot cereal I realized that appearances are starting to matter. Scarlett requested the curtain closed because the sun was in her eyes. I closed half of the curtain and left the other half opened. Scarlett asked me why I did not just close both curtains and I said it was nice to still be able to see outside. Disgruntled, Imogen stated that I should just close both curtains as a passerby might not only see her wearing the bib I made her put on so she didn’t drip on her clean clothes but also that Mickey Mouse Club House was on the TV. I hadn’t even realized. To be fair, I think she even found this humorous but I bet that would be different in a few years.
(OK, OK, I promise right here right now to never make her wear a bib again. A tea towel or a napkin would have been more appropriate for a six year old).
This painting makes me think about being clueless to her growing up. Sometimes I think I only really see my kids in photos. Look how old she is getting. She looks so young when she is sleeping or standing next to her 6′ 2 daddy. But in this picture she has some sort of wisdom I guess I miss when I am dealing with her on a day to day basis.
Yellow Legs
This is a 7″x10″ mixed media painting on paper.
$35 US + $4 shipping
To purchase contact me
OR
http://www.etsy.com/view_listing.php?listing_id=31880431
There is something, for me, about yellow socks/stockings. They are hard to pull off without looking like big bird but, I had a pair when I was 16 and I used to wear them with my Mum’s Honeymoon suit that she got in Liverpool in the sixties before my parents emigrated to Canada. Truly a dream for a girl in the eighties hanging out with ‘The Mods’. I don’t think that I looked like a bird, unless, of course, you are thinking about the English slang for ‘girl’.
Six- SOLD
Imogen is six.
Six is kind of goofy but sometime very mature (actually).
Six is exasperating but there is something about six. I remember being six and I was ME. I was who I am today. I haven’t really changed the way I think or the way I approach a problem.
Take it as you like, it can be both good and bad …
This is a new 24″x24″ mixed media painting on wood. It is $500 + Shipping.
Innocence – SOLD
This is a 4″x8″x3″ mixed media painting on canvas.
My first baby girl turns 6 tomorrow. How did that happen?
Wow. She is amazing to me.
Dreams
This is a 4″x6″ mixed media painting on canvas.
I am continuing on toward mine. Some days they seem far away and some days I look around and realize that I am actually living them.
I will continue to dream on and on.
Available on Etsy.