Through the Eyes of Brittni Bell Warshaw

Can you introduce yourself and tell us a little about your practice?

My name is Brittany Bell Warshaw. I am an abstract painter in Tokyo, Japan. The majority of my work these days is in collaboration with my 3-year-old daughter, Ari.

After moving to Tokyo with your daughter, what did those early years of motherhood like for you?

So I was in a very deep, dark place. I don't know that you can call it postpartum depression, because my daughter was about two and a half when it started happening or about a little after two, and I was really looking for a way to crawl out of it. I was trying everything. I am very isolated. I came over here with a 1-year-old away from my friends and family, and I had no help and we had no friends and trying to be a mother for the first time in a country that I was very unfamiliar with. That all added I think, to the depression and feeling very isolated and very alone and just very sad.

How did you cope with those feelings of isolation and depression?

It felt like a life or death sort of situation. I have got to get out of this. I have to be there for this tiny, perfect human. And yeah, I was, I was trying everything, medication, therapy. I was just looking, I think for an outlet to help let myself go and surrender a little bit and get out of my own head, and also use something like a meditative practice.

When looking for an outlet, how did you come back to painting?

I was like, I used to love to paint in high school. I was very bad at it. Always tried to do like realistic sort of paintings, so I picked it up and challenged myself to work abstract. I'm also a photographer. I was a commercial photographer right before this, and everything is so crispy and perfect and in focus, and we're working with stylists and everyone's working for that one hero image, and that worked so well with my old self, my old personality. But the abstract work definitely combats that in myself.

How has painting with your daughter changed you?

I can feel myself like letting go more and really surrendering to the painting process, surrendering in life in general, like letting things go, being more go with the flow.

Can you tell us about the first painting you did together?

I'm going to bring you back to the first work that we did together. I started painting again to just get out of my own head. And I was really happy with the tones and the colours and was just really feeling it.

My daughter comes home from school and she asks if she can paint. And I was like, ‘Oh yeah, here are your paints and your surface.’ And she was like, ‘No, this one, this one.’ And I was like—I surprised myself by saying yes. And she just went right in the middle with bright red paint and a paintbrush, and I through half-closed eyes was watching her. And it was just so sweet. She was smaller than the canvas and she's using her whole body stretching across and like really just going for it. And I thought that was a really, a really lovely thing to witness and a reminder to myself.

And so that kind of started our journey together. Like later that night after I put her down, I went back to it and started to like more intentionally make it slow with the painting, add my stuff on top of hers and let her shine. So it's this real like push and pull between what she's trying to say and what I'm trying to say without stifling either one of us.

How does the cultural environment of Tokyo influence the work you and your daughter create together?

Tokyo in general, I think has this kind of stereotype of being buttoned up and serious, and it's more group mentality than individual, which I love a lot of. But I can also, as far as the arts community and your creativity, it can really stifle things. You're maybe taught not to stand out and to be quiet and be mindful, which again has some great nuggets. Ari is in there and she's messy, and so she allows me to be messy and it feels maybe in defiance of the kind of buttoned up, perfect, clean-seeming world that we find ourselves in right now.

What are you learning from each other, and what do you hope she takes away from these experiences?

She obviously teaches me a lot on a day-to-day basis, but like specifically while we're painting. Again, just like how to let go and how to really just feel something yourself. And I hope for me, she learns that if she ever decides she wants to be a parent or if she ever gets in a relationship that she can, and no matter what age she is, that she can still be herself and find things for herself.

I can be my own. I can have my own things and still be a good mother and still be a good partner to my husband and still be a good friend. She is never mine, but I am hers. I can be my own and I can have my own life. I hope she just instinctually knows, like she doesn't have to give herself up for any of these things.