Begin Again.....and Again

So, I finished this...

submitted it for a juried show over on the East Slope, a.k.a the Front Range of Colorado and.....it didn't get in.
It happens, and don't worry, this post is not about the injustice of it all. My husband got that earful the last couple of days...and my daughter, driving home from picking her up at college. I told her I just wanted to know if there really was any value in my art or was it more akin to the pool hall dogs on black velvet. She just looked at me and then I thought.... All art has value, even the pool shooting dogs so I'm over it.
And now I can share Begin Again and explain it. To do that, we have to go back to the Tudors and to Queen Elizabeth the First.
Not to go all Art History on you, but, the Tudor Period of England, roughly 1485-1603, without Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat and network news the monarchy had to find a way to communicate with the masses and the way they did that was with symbolism. Every flower had a meaning and everyone knew them. Well, all the people in the know knew them, probably not the serfs out in the fields. But the royal court studied paintings. How a hand was held, what it rested on, what or whom was in the reflection in the mirror, all had meaning. Queen Elizabeth the First knew how to communicate to her subjects and commissioned many a portrait with such symbols as below in the Isaac Oliver's Rainbow Dress.

It looks like the Virgin Queen is about to siphon some gas out of a tank or something. She's not. The "rainbow" colors have faded over time. What has not faded is the bedazzled serpant on her sleeve proclaiming back to Eve...

and God's endorsement to the monarch and "the eyes" and "ears" covering the dress, to declare...." I see and hear everything and am watching you all and listening."

Studying the Tudors communication by symbolism made me want to try it. Thus....Begin Again, which I talked about how I made in my previous post here.

I didn't crochet the lace that became the curtain. That, was made by my great grandmother, who we called Grandmommy. We named our youngest after her and I have her piano.I did knit the sweater, made from yarn that daughter brought me from Ireland last summer, when she got to see County Limerick where our family came from.

The baby is my other daughter, a snap shot of her and me as a reference...

The bunny? 

 I call her my "Runaway Bunny" because of Margret Wise Brown's book, which if you haven't you should read...

The butterfly, in winter? My "Runaway bunny" grew up and modeled for me again...

and I've made a few butterflies in my day... more about Migration in Moab here. The dog?

 Max, my beloved newfie lab that was by my side raising our babies and I still miss everyday...

The winter view of our old homestead, I have looked out at for over twenty years, a change from my childhood when I moved nine times before I headed off to college. 

What does it all mean?

I don't know, nothing deep. Just this fall, my last baby went off to college and I absolutely loved being a mother to my two girls, so I did some art therapy in stitching to come to terms with my little birdies flying away to their adventures.

So Happy Mother's Day to me, to my mother, to my grandmothers and to my great grandmothers and to my daughters, who I hope will be mothers someday and well, Begin Again...