By Bob Keefer of the Register-Guard
Like so many first-time parents, Claire Flint didn’t quite grasp the magnitude of having a baby.
Life would go on, the young Eugene artist blithely figured. So would her painting.
“Yeah, right,” Flint said, laughing, the other morning as she talked at her River Road-area home studio about parenthood and art. “I thought I’d be painting every day with the baby in a sling.”
Flint is one of three artists whose work is being shown in “Reliquary: The Everyday Sacred,” a show that’s opening today at the Hult Center’s Jacobs Gallery.
Her paintings in the show are created in the style of Byzantine icons, those small formal portraits of Mary and Jesus and various saints and angels that were made by Eastern Orthodox craftsmen in the sixth and later centuries. Flint made the first of them — small, whimsical portraits of friends — before her daughter, Penny, was born 16 months ago.
Since then, working in tiny slivers of stolen time, she’s expanded that theme, painting larger and more autobiographical works that depict, let’s say, an exhausted looking Madonna.
Flint isn’t religious. Born in Santa Barbara, she grew up the daughter of counterculture parents — “They’ve always got some cause,” she says with a mix of admiration and skepticism — and spent part of her childhood on a commune. She lived for much of her life in Clark Fork, Idaho, a tiny town near Sand Point. There she taught herself to paint, using watercolors.
Fast forward. Flint — now 29 — has lived in Colorado, Santa Barbara and Seattle, studied graphic design and shifted her art from watercolor to oil painting. She arrived in Eugene in 2003. She’s shown her work here at the Downtown Intitiative for the Visual Arts, at the former Cafe Paradiso and at Sam Bonds Garage.
Those first pre-motherhood icons were small, quick portraits, like one she did of former Eugene (now Portland) artist and arts patron Carolezoom Patterson, capturing Patterson’s wide-eyed enthusiasm as well as her white tracheotomy tube.
With the help of her sister, who has given some time to watch the baby, Flint has finally begun to find ways to carve studio time out of her domestic routine.
But that first year wasn’t easy. “I had a hard time with postpartum,” she said, struggling slightly to find the right words to express the challenge of life with a new baby. Her own life, she said finally, seemed “overwritten.”
“She changed everything,” Flint said. “For the better. But everything I had ever done before that was no longer even close to important.”
Flint left her job as a designer with Presentation Design Group as she battled sleep deprivation and the growing sense that her profession had been unexpectedly bulldozed by a tiny baby.
“I went from super-driven career girl to being a mother. Penny was nursing around the clock.
“We were co-sleeping. I was the human pacifier. It changed my relationship to time and multi-tasking. It sucks your brain away.”
She was lucky to be able to schedule two hours a week in the studio. She learned to paint in snatches of a few minutes at a time, making quick sketches during naps. When she did arrange childcare, it was all she could do not to collapse into the bathtub or simply sit and stare at the wall.
At the same time, though, she worked at being an artist even while changing diapers, conceptualizing work and planning what to do next.
“I was thinking about art, all the time.”
Also in the Jacobs show are works by Sarah Grew and Ken Herrin.
Grew, a Eugene artist, uses found materials with painting and photography to re-examine everyday objects; wax is used as a scrim to partially obscure her subject.
Herrin uses woodworking techniques in his art; he won Best of Show at the Eugene Mayor’s Art Show in 2004.