The Birth Of Creativity

In an interview, the painter Kathryn Lynch describes how having children has impacted her art:

Children grow you. Painting is responding to life and being a mother expands who you are and what you respond to. If you make more life rub up against you, you have more of a world to make art from. I like what Charlie Parker says: “If you don’t live it, it won’t come out of your horn.” I feel like my paintings are better and bigger because of my children. You respond to whatever is in your life, and the people you have in your life feed your painting. Perhaps I am painting my children. I think I am putting everything and everyone I know in my work.

Because I saw myself first and foremost as an artist, I never thought I wanted children. The desire to be a mother came out of the blue at age thirty-six. Perhaps that I paint makes me more animal than intellect.

The two fastest paintings I ever did, and which I felt were some of my strongest paintings, were done two weeks after each child was born. My children brought out my lioness. When I went to paint after giving birth, it was easy to give birth to a painting, the paint just knew where to put itself on the canvas. In those moments I realized that my painting, and my ability to paint, was very directly related to events and occurrences in my life.

(Image: Mother and Child by Kathryn Lynch. For more of her work, visit her website here. Her painting will be featured at the Metro Show in January 2014)