THE ART OF LIFE WITH MAYA

MAYA APOSTOLOSKA Mother, Artist, and Children-vs-Art

Art is a serious job which has been characterized by extreme ambition, discipline, and self-control while the success in the art is sort of a doubleedged sword because it is querying a lot of sacrificing. The biggest sacrifice of all is either being a great artist and a mediocre parent, or the reverse. Synchronously, motherhood and being a great profitable artist is impossible, because both art and parenthood take all one’s time and focus.

In my opinion, artwork feels limitless because anything can be art: behaving, dressing, talking, cooking, living. Art shows a perspective of things we may not be used to or which we do not have easy access to. Art signals expression in a pure form and pulls our minds into a different point of time, a different location and story or existence. Often in that subjective interpretation, we are looking for judgment if the piece of art is inspirational and valuable or not to us. What matters is that the creative sacrificed almost all convention and comfortable in the name of art. They sacrificed the approval from others for support of themselves.

The freedom of the artist’s currency is recognizing and accepting the uncertain space between what success looks like to others and what success feels like to themselves-the artists.

When it comes to creative inspiration (limited in relation art-motherchildren), the unique and valuable art creates things to see differently as an alternate paradox of our regular lives. Inspiration comes from action and experimentation.

I have never been ambivalent about having children and ever worried that motherhood will affect my art vocation. Still, I agree with Marina Abramovich, who says that having children would have been a disaster for her work – knowing how talented she is and what art genuinely means to her. Her existence is pure art by itself. She, just as other “childless” woman artist, have chosen to not compromise in art. They are all accomplished woman artists. They are a synonym of what art has to be, an authentic and legitimate, pure art.

Understandable, I haven’t lost anything choosing to be a mother. Indeed, I gain much more: Love, Family and three beautiful children. For sure, my life became more complicated and more precious.

My lifestyle as a mother artist changed dramatically what naturally affected and diminished my productive time of creating art. Now that I have children, the time is “more significant” and has “more weight”. Being a parent made my need to explore issues of personal identity even stronger.

My thoughts opened wildly to world observation. Balancing passion and motherhood are exceptionally heavy. I always relax by the idea that being productive and creative has many different modifications, so the one I use now is conducted from the needs of my children. They will be contingent on me just for a few more years, and once they are grown up and became physically independent, I will have more time to be romanticized and subjective to myself and my art again. Alone in my studio where the freedom from rules and rigid constrains, free to pursue my ideas and dreams into one wild, imaginative art seemingly crafted from a place where only art can come from-my hearth.

I firmly believe that some women can be obsessed with two things simultaneouslyart and her child.

The presence of the child is intense and affects creativity, but also is an extraordinary gift for the art. It increases the complexity of the artwork invention, and it intensifies the perspectives and refers to those mothers-artists who are already having independency from the children’s needs. It could be possibly easier for some photographer to work and seriously succeed with the photos (maybe even of her child) because shooting with a camera is happening fast. My opinion is that photography as a medium and digital media might be more open to mothers-artists rather than painting and sculpture-mothers because photography’s rise in the marketplace coincided with the rise of feminism and needs less effort to be created. Oppositely, as a painter and graphic artist are experiencing adversity and dilemmas because besides the required inspiration and idea, mostly am in a lack of time and energy. Colouring on canvas or drawing precisely is an abstract action with three small children. I am connected to practising middleaged methods and technics, where the whole process of creating and performing art becomes a very ambitious, challenging and unsafe even fatal activity because of the acids used in the process of old-fashioned printing graphics. Running toddlers around would destruct my concentration and made me even frustrated; that’s why at this stage of my career being restricted and limited to undertake art seriously. In this break of my creative course, I am considering myself still as an artist, because an artist never ceases to create art! Art, in any form, demands that I turned myself inside out because obligatory am obsessed for it to be any good.

By any means, the presence of my children is only helping me to enter at any moment into that-alikewalking dream modified reality. It is undoubtedly controversial harmonizing of escape into a different time-mentality transport and reality-where not even temporarily I shift my perspective.

My beautiful children are generating one particularly rare nirvana where old versions of myself are shed, while I am in a state of “selfgrowth” being and enduring the entire spectrum of emotions to evolve new releases of art truly.