For Maw

The Turtle and Me

My friend Maw Shein Win is currently doing a residency at the Headlands Center For The Arts to work on her poetry. As part of her residency she's asked 10 of her friends to make drawings for her that she's writing poems about. I'm very honored to be one those she asked. This is the drawing that I gave to her. It's taken from a combination of the two paintings that my mother did when I was around 2-3 years old.

I remember watching her as she painted them and I was disappointed that the turtle wasn't in my painting. My mother just recently gave me both of these paintings when I visited in July. I wanted to draw or redraw the image of myself through my eyes now and how I wanted it at the time. I was interested in really looking at the images and thinking about my mother and her thoughts as she painted these over thirty years ago. Doing the drawing now made me feel closer to my mother and really appreciate her work and creativity -- being an artist myself now and having a much greater perspective on who she was or might have been as a young artist.