Pieta

Pieta
2014
Watercolor
11" x 14"
Framed and ready to hang
$100 email mandabrezicky@gmail.com for purchase info

It's been a while since I just lost myself painting. I forgot how freeing it can be to trust my skills and turn my conscious mind off.

Motherhood is such a funny/sad thing. 

Time To Get the Blog Back Together

                  There's always this moment
                  when I meet other parents at      
                  school and they're like, "Oh,
                  what do you do?"

                  "Oh, I'm an artist." And then I
                  can tell if they're from my
                  neighborhood or the more
                  affluent neighborhood.

                  Because the parents in my
                  neighborhood are all, "Oh,
                  cool! That's very neat, what
                  do you do?"

                  The more affluent parents
                  get a little quiet, and then,
                  "So, do you teach, or...?"

                  "No, I sell art. That I make."

                  "Like at craft shows?"

                  "Nooo, large art festivals."

                  And the more affluent parents
                  never ask me substantive
                  questions about my work -
                  they're only interested in the
                  money part. Maybe next time
                  someone asks, I should say, "I
                  embroider dicks and paint
                  dead babies for cash."

A random thought I posted on Ello a few months back, when I went to my kids' Curriculum Night. Sadly, I have not yet implemented Operation Dicks and Corpses - somehow I think even the usually non-judgey parents I have befriended would disapprove. Ah well.

Monotype Mania

What better way to pass the day between fights with a screen, than monotype? Although to be honest, I don't know how I feel about these.

Printing Madness

Dear Gojo,

Roses are sometimes red,
Violets are...violet.
I love the way you smell,
And the ink from my hands you take all of it.

Courage

Conceptually, my work has focused on reproductive issues the last 4 years or so, largely influenced by my activism. Specifically, I'm focusing more on motherhood issues and maternal mental illness this past year, but I've always been passionately pro-choice. It was through pro-choice activism that I became acquainted with Michelle Kinsey Bruns, and later met her in person when she co-chaired an event I had a painting in. Michelle always has very intelligent and thoughtful things to say, but this article she has up on Feministing today really struck me. I've been diving more into the power of narratives in art to create societal change in my own work, but I've been a little timid when it comes to using my own narrative in my work. Producing art work and putting it in the public sphere is already such a vulnerable thing - how much more so when you scrub yourself raw and put your personal struggles in there too?

I've been feeling lately, though, that I have to go there. Especially for my thesis show. Michelle's article today, the courage she had to stand up on that train and then to also put it out online gives me courage too. These are the stories we need to share and get out there, as artists, as activists, and as people if we ever want to change anything.

(originally written for a blog I'm keeping for a class, but I felt it needed to be here as well)

Monotype portraits

I've been strangely drawn to doing portraits in monotype lately. It's not a process I was familiar with before this past semester, but it was the preferred method of my printmaking class's TA.

If etching and lithography are like drawing, monotype is like painting. It doesn't have the reproducibility of other printmaking methods - you only get one. You take flat, thin, non-absorbent surface (either an etching plate or plexiglas) and work onto is with ink using more or less whatever you want. Alternatively, you can create a subtractive image by inking the whole plate and then wiping away with a rag or brush or what-not. I started out having a lot of fun with the latter, but I've been leaning more towards additive or a combination of both.

I'm digging the re-work-ability of monotypes too. Once they're dry, they can totally be gone back into with another medium. Colored pencils have been doing it for me; the juxtaposition of painterly wiping with precise line work feels kind of satisfying.

And I don't know why, but I keep doing these Victorian Death Portraits! I find the darn things immensely fascinating to look at it, and a lot of times I'm banging out some monotypes while I'm waiting for a plate to etch or a print to dry enough to add the next color, so I guess it's a natural gravitation.

I hate it when they're right.

Trigger warning for depression and self-injury.

It's really hard to talk to people about feeling depressed. I mean, beyond the hurdles of finding the motivation to talk about it at all and getting the courage to make yourself utterly vulnerable to another person by bringing it up, it can just be plain old hard to explain. Particularly if the person you're talking to has no first-hand experience with depression.

For me, it's cyclical. For as long as I can remember, it's come and gone. The worst points were when I was a teenager and after Thing 2 was born.

Since this time last year up till a few months ago, I've been pretty good. Euphoric even, on occasion. Around April I hit a snag. It'd been a long time coming...when you're paying attention and you've been dealing with depression as long as I have, you learn to read the early signs. Kind of like how when the wind picks up in just such a way that you can see the undersides of leaves on trees and you know a storm's coming? It's little, intuitive things like that. The beginning signs started in January, but the storm didn't start till April.

Ok, I swear there's a point to all of this (besides melodramatic imagery)!

So, not wanting this to fuck up a good thing I have going right now with school, I ventured forth and talked to one of my professors about it one night. He's a really good guy, really easy to talk to. I think he might have missed a promising career as a therapist. But of course he inevitably asked the question, "What are you depressed about?"

In my opinion, that is the most frustrating question to ask a depressed person. I literally never know what or why I'm depressed...when I'm in one of the down swings, I'm depressed about everything.

Did I mention this professor of mine is a seemingly-unwavering optimist? So of course that answer didn't satisfy him. He said (not in a condescending way) I ought to figure it out and channel it into art. Someone (I think it was K) said that that's what professors always say about anything bad - turn it into art. I think they always say it though because it's not a bad idea.

It started with a colored etching. As a recovering cutter (8 years!), self-injury is always a temptation when it gets bad. So instead, I started an etching of my arms (it still needs work, so I won't be posting it any time soon). It actually felt empowering, to confront the urge head on instead of quietly pretending it doesn't exist like I usually do.

As the semester ended, we incoming seniors had a meeting with the professor teaching capstone next year, and she gave us some guidelines for starting our capstone research over the summer. The first step was to sit down and brainstorm possible topics and questions that interest us and might lead to a thesis. I've known for months my capstone would have to have something to do with reproductive rights; that's just a given for me. And I've been mining motherhood and family history for ideas the last year or so. But I still had my professor's advice in the back of my mine while I was brainstorming topics. Everything I listed ended up being some variation on the intersection of motherhood and mental illness in social justice terms.

This leads me to my point, and my super exciting capstone.

Is postpartum depression to narrowly defined? What factors contribute towards the onset of depression after the window for PPD has "passed?" What are the most effective forms of treatment? Why aren't there more non-medicinal treatments available?

I don't have a definitive thesis yet, but this is my capstone! As soon as I scribbled "motherhood and depression" in my sketchbook, I felt electrified about it. It's such a personal topic and something I'm passionate about. I believe strongly in the marriage of art and activism to change the world, and this is a direction that could use more attention and help to it. And simultaneously, I'll be purging my psyche.

I'm not naive enough to think this will magically cure my life-long depression. But I'm already feeling my mood swinging back up. A couple of friends have been teasing me about doing all my research before the fall semester starts; but the research is making me too busy and passionate to feel depressed most days and I can already feel like I'm moving towards an upswing. And hey, I'll have a hell of a lot of work done towards my paper besides.

So the clichés professors say sometimes...they're not always such bad ideas.