Rebecca Cristante

Happy Mother's Day 💐
I wish I had more time to come up with a heartfelt or humorous post about the rewards and challenges of motherhood, but I'm still too busy in the thick of it to reflect upon it....!
So, instead enjoy 33% off anything in my Etsy shop today and tomorrow with code MOTHERSDAY

"slow steps
Like snake slithers
then sleep.
My charcoal skin
still warm
and loosening.
I break free

(Born again.
With this new tougher skin
underneath.)"

-Rebecca Cristante

I remember a time when seeing one of my paintings out in the wild meant that my discriminating gaze would lay upon some flaw that I had not noticed before, and like a historical restorator I would want to break out my little traveling case of paints and brushes and get to work on it right then and there, reminiscent of a statement some of us might remember from art history class that "art is never finished, only abandoned."

But now when this happens I am pleasantly surprised, as if seeing a friend's child who has grown several inches since our last encounter. But of course it is not the painting that has changed; it is me. Every day there is something in this world that breaks my heart just a little more than it did the day before. That is the nature of life. So the fact that after four decades of living I still have the uncanny ability to fall in love with the bloom of a flower, a sunset, or the way the foam sits just right in my coffee cup, is now what I see when I run into my own work.

What (or whom) have you fallen in love with today?