“Their proportions are strange,” says Pia Bramley. “They exist completely at odds with the rest of the world.”
The artist is talking about drawing babies, something she has been doing a lot of since her son, Fran, was born two years ago. She describes seeing Marlene Dumas’s giant watercolour baby paintings in the Netherlands, with their large, almost alien-like heads and flailing arms. “I thought of that exhibition when my son was born. I’d seen pictures of babies on nappy boxes and adverts for baby shampoo, and that is not what they look like. When Fran was born he was absolutely purple with solid black eyes and his hands were in claw shapes.”
Bramley has just published Pandemic Baby, that collates a series of drawings about the “bonkers experience” of parenting in lockdown. The artist, who graduated from the University of Brighton and studied at the Royal Drawing School, has always worked from experience. “I’ve just drawn what’s around me and what’s happening to me,” she says. “And obviously when you have a baby, nothing else happens to you apart from that you are with a baby.”
Historically, even some of the best artists have struggled with depicting babies. There’s even a blog, Ugly Renaissance Babies, which posts amusingly grotesque attempts to capture infants – usually the baby Jesus – on canvas. “My God, I’ve drawn those babies 100 times,” says Bramley. “At the Drawing School you do loads of drawings from paintings in the National Gallery. But they are different from drawing actual babies. The paintings just look like squashed adults.”
Sketching Fran became a natural part of her practice. Like her other work, she posted her drawings on Instagram, and noticed that in the first lockdown – when she and her partner and son were confined to a small flat in Whitechapel, east London – she started to get more engagement, especially from other parents. Looking after a baby is not dissimilar to being legally restricted from leaving the house, with one big exception. In lockdown: “You don’t get to meet any other babies … We’d gone from being able to go to groups and meet parents. I suppose Instagram images of families were maybe the only way of seeing what other people were doing.”
Then an editor from Icon Books, who had just had a baby in lockdown, got in touch about collaborating on something to mark the experience of new parents, and Pandemic Baby was born.
The result is a tender, funny and frank collection of images, some based on Bramley’s experience and some on those of other parents. It serves as a memento, but her view is far from rose-tinted. As a friend said to her, looking after a baby is “like having the best time and the worst time of your life all at once”. One picture, for example, describes taking the bins out as “Finding moments of solitude” (the baby is pressed up against the glass of the window, wondering where its mother has gone), while another shows an infant’s rapid mood change with the caption: “The space between joy and fury feels very small.”
“One person said, no one is going to buy this book because no one is going to want to remember the horror they’ve just experienced,” Bramley laughs. “I said, ‘You might be right’ … though a few people have got in touch to say they’ve bought it because they want their children to be able to look at it.” One of the friends I recommended it to said that she loved it and that it made her cry, and that she found it “very cathartic”.
Bramley cites Louise Bourgeois as an influence, particularly her drypoint images from the 1990s, many of them depictions of her sons and domestic life. “The British Museum has a collection and you can just go and look at them. I did that a couple of years ago and they are really astonishing.” She has also long admired Charlotte Salomon, and was bowled over by Life? or Theatre? at the Jewish Museum with her son shortly before everything locked down. “They’re so inventive. We’re so used to seeing drawings and paintings of one event, in one time in one space … those pictures, the way she makes time progress and the way she moves between spaces in one image, it’s just mindblowing.”
Scenes of motherhood and domestic life by female artists haven’t always been respected in the art world. “If I was a man making these drawings, I think people would be astonished,” she says. “People would probably have asked me to exhibit. I feel like I’d have got more attention … a man talking about his child is seen as a sign of him being spiritually connected and having the capacity for profound thought, but a woman talking about her baby is just her jabbering about her sweet angel. If my husband takes my baby to baby group people are like, ‘It’s so nice that you’re doing that.’ No one has ever, ever told me I’m a great parent just for looking after my son.”
“I would desperately love to exhibit them,” she continues. “I’ve reached a point now where I feel like myself with a baby, as opposed to just this total stranger.” As to what Fran will make of them: “I wonder if he’ll be delighted or absolutely horrified.” Whichever it is, he’s a part of history.
