Long Ago

The young girl in this collage is my mother in 1935, when she was 13.  It was taken in Miami Beach.  The original photo was hand colored. 

Despite the fact that my mother and I never had a relationship that gelled into anything positive and that I had not been in contact with her at all for the better part of nearly 30 years (she died this January), I do have a small number of old photos of her to use in artwork.

Below is a quilt I did in 2010.  These images of her were taken at the same time as the photo above.  The central image was printed on muslin; the other two are actual photos stitched onto cotton fabric.

The sentiment in both, "You were a girl once, too," refers to the fact that by the time I was a young girl, mom seemed to have completely forgotten that she was also young once.  My teen years were hellacious times brought on by the early stages of my mother's madness.  I never had the opportunity to have a joyful, loving start in life...

...which segues into the phrase probably most of us have heard by now, "It's never too late to have a happy childhood."  Art making is giving me that happy childhood now.