Honoring Your Inner Tutu: Mothers of Invention

As a trained painter, Grube has always found it interesting to watch a child paint and see what decisions she makes with regard to color and form. But she also began to find that painting—and other art making—is a very social activity for children. They riff off of one another and begin artistic conversations. In her drawing classes, when one person comes up with a new look on the page, other kids will want to mimic it. “If they think is really unique, they’ll say they’re copyrighting it!” Grube laughs.

That Grube’s own work has a fanciful flare is not surprising. Her art heroes tend toward painters with a faux naïve style. But how much of that bent comes from working with kids or being a mother is hard to say. There’s an unspoken dialogue between parents and children, teachers and students, she believes, in which both sides influence the other. “Would I have put on parades [Grube’s answer to performance art] with giant paper maché creatures if it weren’t for having kids?” she asks, and then shrugs as if to say, “It doesn’t matter.”

With three-year old Ruby in tow, artist Clare Crespo is closer to untangling her whimsy from her motherhood than Grube. “I was definitely into weird stuff before Ruby,” she says, ticking off some of her obsessions: crocheted watches—both analog and digital, dioramas, and food theme parties. Food especially was her passion, and she dreamt of making a career out of it but couldn’t quite imagine how. She held on to her “fancy” job producing music videos and commercials until she just couldn’t stand it any more and took the proverbial plunge.

She started a clunky, quirky Web site, Yummyfun.com, and published a book, The Secret Life of Food. “I thought they’d mainly appeal to other weirdo adults like me,” she admits. But soon the fan mail started rolling in from kids. “A girl in Iowa made my recipe for sushi cupcakes and won first prize at the State Fair!” she recalls.

At the same time that Crespo’s second book was coming out, Hey There, Cupcake, her daughter Ruby was born. Ironically, for such a whimsical person, becoming a parent was a bit of a low point. “My identity had been so wrapped up in what I did,” she says, “that I sensed that when people asked what I was up to, ‘Taking care of my kid’ was not a valid answer.”