Tirzah Garwood and Diane di Prima

The creative impulse of motherhood and the demands of the home

Tirzah Garwood diorama, her daughter Anne swinging on a swing below the tree

This weekend we went to see the Tirzah Garwood exhibit at the Dulwich Picture Gallery, ‘Beyond Ravilious’. The exhibition included Garwood’s wood engravings, marbled papers, quilts, oil paintings and dioramas. It was so moving, her body of work but also the circumstances of her life. I was particularly drawn to her story - she married to the artist Eric Ravilious, a well known British painter, when she was just 22. They moved from London to the countryside, where they had three children. A year after her third child Anne was born, Garwood was diagnosed with breast cancer and had an emergency mastectomy. Shortly after that her husband went to Iceland to work as a war artist and was killed in a plane crash. She went on to live for only nine years after she was first diagnosed with cancer, but in that time created a huge body of oil paintings and dioramas. Much of her work was centred around the home and her children, the cats in the kitchen and hen who laid her eggs next to the hearth, the nativity scene she created for the local church, the snowmen built in the garden. Her children appear throughout much of her work, swinging on a rope swing suspended below a tree in a diorama, peeking out of windows, asleep in their beds in pencil sketches. At the end of her life she painted oil paintings from her bed, and these heartbreakingly mostly focused on childhood and toys, with toy trains puffing through the countryside, dolls walking in the wood, the artist herself as a doll lying in bed in a dollhouse.

I felt a sadness for her particularly around motherhood - she got breast cancer soon after the birth of her third child and had a mastectomy, so I assume that was the end of breastfeeding. In her sketches of her children sleeping their innocence of what was soon to come, the death of both their father and mother, was particularly haunting. However I also loved how she turned their daily life into art. She had a huge scrapbook that she used to create scenes for her children, often with her husband’s discarded watercolours. I particularly enjoyed their Christmas card one year which envisioned the whole family as snow people. She created a beautiful quilt for a child’s cot. She made dioramas in frames used by specimen collectors which featured her children and other family members.

The family Christmas card

Tirzah Garwood’s life and art made me think of Diane di Prima, who I wrote my dissertation on eons ago. I titled it with a quote of di Prima’s: ‘The Requirements of Life is the Form of our Art’. Di Prima, unusually for her time, refused to marry as she believed that once she did, her life would be subsumed to the desires of her husband: ‘Not that I for one minute thought of including a man in my life, in my home…who thought he knew how things should be done, how money should be spent, even worse, how children should be raised. As far as I could see, all they were was trouble.’ She was shrewd enough to see the evidence in front of her. The most famous Beat, Jack Kerouac, modelled On the Road on his own road trip with Neal Cassady in which they escaped middle class domestic values and set out for the freedom. However, it was women who made this possible - Kerouac lived with his mother many times in his adult life, and Carolyn Cassady was left at home with her three children while Neal Cassady spent their savings on a new maroon Hudson and went on the road. Allen Ginsberg said “Yes, it’s all right to blame the men for exploiting the women – or, I think the point is, the men didn’t push the women literally or celebrate them. But then, among the group of people we knew at the times, who were the [women] writers of such power as Kerouac or Burroughs? Were there any? I don’t think so.” There were plenty of Beat writers who were women, however their writing could never progress because they became not only the upholders of the domestic sphere but also the breadwinners who had to support their families.

di Prima and some of her children

Diane di Prima freed herself from these shackles by never staying with one man for too long. She wanted children in an animal way, her body requested them: ‘My physical being had come to a place where it wanted to flower, to put out fruit and seed…I knew with certainty that if I foiled it I would not and could not live happily’. Just like Garwood, children awakened a creativity in her that brought art tumbling forth.

One of my most treasured possessions!

When I was first pregnant I felt that creativity was exploding out of me, as if the act of creating and growing another being within me permeated my whole self. I wrote, I knitted, I made a tapestry, I collaged. I felt like I had tapped into some secret endless source of creativity. After she was born, I realised the creativity of course was not endless. Gone were my days of waking early with a mug of tea and writing my morning pages. I felt so shattered with night feeds and the constant unfinished tasks of new parenthood that the firework of creativity I had experienced in pregnancy became a tiny flickering flame. It never went out though. Yesterday I spent a good while making ‘rocket computers' out of old cardboard boxes and that fed the flame enough for me to want to write. Being around children helps foster creativity. They look at the world as shape and colour, as stories and song. They are inspiring, as Garwood herself wrote: ‘the charming distortions of perspective and proportion, the fantasy and the unexpected beauties of colour that children produce in their pictures’.

Childbirth and mothering are the seeds of creativity, but the demands of homemaking and daily life damp creativity out unless we make a conscious effort to allow that creativity to thrive. I’m still figuring that part out and so far when I’m not doing children’s art projects it’s looking like a lot of late nights to write. The Artist’s Way is calling me again - if anyone wants to join me I’m hoping to start in March.

In the meantime, I wish you creativity in your homemaking.

Read some of Diane di Prima’s poem’s here and see her reading from her epic poem Loba here. See the Tirzah Garwood exhibition in person if you can!

Little creatives at work