When I receive this text: “Do you have a painting for a hysterectomy?”
“Why, of course I do.”
And then I said goodbye to this sweet painting this morning. SOLD. I love that she has a new home and love everything this painting gave me.
Fertility by Marika Reinke
This is a place of gratitude and unpeeling place of wonder.
You devotedly received her everything; visceral love, familial strength, earthly creation and boundless, mysterious motherhood. They seed securely in your cosmos; timeless and ancestral.
This place has done her selfless duty and given until she needed to no longer.
This is a place of love and a place of beauty. A place for pocket-shrines and vistas in her name.
13” x 10” Watercolor
Fertility by Marika Reinke 2017Fertility by Marika Reinke 2005 (c)Fertility by Marika Reinke 2005 (c)
But here’s a challenge: define Beauty. And why does it matter?
I intuit Beauty is important to the human experience. I’m sure some happiness researcher has done a study that shows Beauty is important to cultivating happiness. And geesh, happiness is so important these days that scientists study it. The magic happiness pill makes lots of money.
Beauty is healing too. And Beauty is more.
Here is a story
I’ve started to sell a little on Etsy. A customer approached me in a conversation about a print Fertility. She has been having a hard time conceiving and she wanted a piece of art that would help her imagine conceiving but also a healthy reproductive system. She wanted to know what my thought process was going into this painting.
Fertility (c) Marika Reinke
It took me a year to conceive my daughter. I relate to this struggle. It was one of my most difficult times.
Here is my response.
I painted this when I was having a hard time conceiving as well. It is such an exhaustingly emotional and baffling time. I didn’t know what was wrong or if there was something wrong. It was just hard and trying and gut wrenching. As you know. I was learning a different relationship with my body. I didn’t have full control of it. I was powerless in a way I never expected.
With this painting I was trying to imagine what my body looked like from within. I was learning to love me as I was. That it could be beautiful, not a scientific drawing, an x-Ray or broken somehow. It was and is amazing.
So it is a painting of a beautiful womb, artistically experienced (not scientifically rendered) from the heart. There are ovaries, and layers of red, shapes of the feminine ovals, circles and hearts. It is a place of love and power as it is. It is a place of potential.
There are suggestions of implantation. Yes. At the time that was my dream. But not a reality.
The blues are deeply soothing and mark and frame the womb. They bring power and contrast to the subject. They are organic shapes to suggest movement, other organs and life. I love that you see feathers! Yes!
Personally, I love the colors in this painting.
For my limited edition prints, I will hand highlight and embellish the painting with iridescent paints, silver or gold. If you have an idea you would like me to embed in the painting when I do this, I’d be honored to mark it that way for you as well. I embellish them when the order comes in. If you decided to purchase it, just send me a message and I can do this. They are high quality prints on watercolor paper and take this paint beautifully.
My hope is that it would help give you some peace and self-love in a difficult time and it would be meaningful for you as well.
In all, we exchanged 37 messages. By the 6th or 7th exchange she purchased a print. For the next dozen or so, we exchanged messages on how to hand embellish the print. This customer took full ownership of her print, directing me to mix a 1:1 ratio of gold and silver and very specifically directing me to the places she wanted highlighted. Here is the result:
Fertility highlighted (c) Marika Reinke
I loved the exchange. We collaborated and connected. As we communicated, I learned about her and her trying time. I have deep empathy and hope for her. I hope that she loves herself and through her process she becomes a mother.
Equally, the process made us both vulnerable. I had hopes this print would bring her peace and support. She had hope this print would touch her and bring her beauty, healing, peace in an emotionally exhausting time.
I mailed the print and we waited, holding our breath that our hopes would be realized.
Here is the beginning of her 5 star review. I say we succeeded:
“When I saw my painting I could not restrain tears of joy and hope that filled me up. Thank you, Marika, for a beautiful custom work! …”Read more here (In my opinion, it’s a good read).
But also this is Beauty. Not just Art the Product, but the Whole Process. Beauty.
We should celebrate baseline mammograms like a birthday, anniversary or graduation.
Mammograms usher in a new era. Let’s make it official and celebrate. In this era, I take the bodies of my friends and loved ones who age with me side by side. A party is necessary.
Technically, I “do not have a history of breast or ovarian cancer” in my family. This is routine.
But, I have a history of cancer; ovarian, breast or otherwise.
I remember the colleague who passed away from breast cancer within a year of our first meeting. Shockingly quickly.
I sting when I think of a younger acquaintance whose breast cancer returned just yesterday.
My heart aches for a beloved colleague as she forges her legacy in the face of stage 4 cancer.
At 49, my father died of gall bladder cancer. With this birthday I have entered the decade in which he passed. This does not escape me.
And others…
I have a history of cancer. I own this history.
This is what I speak of when I say a mammogram is sign of turning 40. Aging brings the continual pile of stories and we are wise to listen.
So when the technician pointed at her screen and said, “Here, come and look at this.” I held my boiling feelings in check. She was painfully inscrutable.
I looked and thought how achingly beautiful.
That was my breast with lovely web-like trestles, like palm prints, keeping history. That was my opaque muscle cradling it. That was my story; my puberty, my first bra, my sexuality, the humble pride, my first love, the assault and guilt, the sun bathing, my cleavage, the tight-or-loose shirt, swollen from pregnancy, aching from breastfeeding, my milk-giving children’s body, cradling them then slowly turning away and now my own but never the same. And now to be examined indefinitely.
We should celebrate a baseline mammogram because left unto themselves, they sting and stench of aging and forgetting.
But if we listen, they tell our stories and we are all wise to listen.
My Mammogram sketch (c) Marika Reinke 2015
I should mention, the technician wanted to show me my pectoral muscle which extends significantly longer than average and revealed my “tremendous upper body strength.” Another story in the mammogram.
Goodbye Adrian: A Story of Miscarriage (c) Marika Reinke 2015
Through the echoes of death, love, blood, fear and sad slow tears we rode this goodbye learning that being lost in the unknowable, uncontrollable, unimaginable only brings wordless awe for the mystery of life.
All things happen for incomprehensible reasons. Souls were meant to meet. This soul needed a fleeting chance to feel our love and a name to be complete.
watercolor 16″ x 12″
about My Miscarriage
In 2008, I miscarried. I sensed something was wrong and an early 7 week ultrasound proved the pregnancy was not viable. Adrian had not developed past 5 weeks. We grieved; our already-named baby, our hopes, our plans for our kids and our imaginary family.
I waited for the miscarriage to happen naturally.
Week by week went by and nothing happened. I still felt pregnant, I was nauseous and irritable. My confused body still wanted to tend to the Adrian’s lifeless form. I felt weak, tired and sad in my waiting. It was a time of intense numbness and many tears.
After 4 weeks, I began to miscarry and it went terribly wrong. The bleeding was too heavy. At the ER waiting room it went from somewhat concerning to intense and scary. I passed out. A black, cold, viscous faint that sucked my life force and took away my capacity to think. I lost far too much blood.
I was revived and received an emergency D & C. When I woke from the operation, I was enveloped in a deep sadness. Adrian almost took me with him. I felt stuck and empty from the violent parting. My capacity to create life had almost taken my own life.
Untitled Chaos (c) Marika Reinke 2008 – I painted after I miscarried 2008.
It is not a coincidence that I became pregnant with my son the same month that Adrian would have been born. It was our last goodbye and parting blessing.
Miscarriage is a silent and common grief many women bare. At least 10% – 35% pregnancies are estimated to end preemptively.
FEATURED
This painting was featured on the cover of the German magazine raum&zeit May 2016 issue.
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