#ittakesalifetime

[chrisjrice]

This is a page from a sketchbook I kept in the early 1980’s. I’d just read “The Poetics of Space” by Bachelard and was obsessed with a person’s psychic space. Outward geometric Manifestation of an internal state. Wrong? I wrote under the self portrait. Don’t know what you’re doing. My fear. Not a whole painting. Comment from others. I questioned myself but kept going. Ten years transitioned out of foster care. My childhood experience stored in my body: emotive and disruptive and often fragmented. When my son saw the finished work he covered his eyes and ran from the room. #driven #selfportraits #notebooks #fostergirls #ittakesalifetime #pushthroughthegiveup #iusedtobeanartist https://www.instagram.com/p/B72hMYPBnAE/?igshid=ksgbvvc8bc4g

[chrisjrice]

​When I went into the foster care system I left the women of my family behind. My maternal grandmother and her three daughters. I ran away from them and stayed away. From Mama on the left, her mother who I called Bom Bom in the middle, my tall aunt, and my scary aunt. I ran away from my family of origin. I wanted to graduate high school and go to college. I wanted to live in one place for more than a year. I wanted quiet to read and time to think. I wanted to be heard. To be touched with kindness. To shake off the shame of ignorance and poverty. With all my being I wanted to make art but I didn’t know how or where to begin. I’d never read my story between the covers of a book, or seen what I knew to be true on the walls of a museum for all to see. Art and literature as a refusal of shame: not a love story, or a ghost story, a lesson about time and truth and trauma. I’d always imagined that happiness was at its most basic level a feeling of safety and security: letting your defenses down, making yourself fully at home in your life, as opposed to taking up a defensive stance. But I didn’t know what that looked like. #keepingupwiththekardashians #fostergirls #whereicamefrom #driven #ittakesalifetime https://www.instagram.com/p/B7qrnQiBB8O/?igshid=1gwbrze5o4vxm

[chrisjrice]

A strong physical constitution, the ability to size up a room, an ear open for the unspeakable, the doubt, and the blocked dreams, in the lives around me. These are some of the qualities I developed growing up on the road. This is me at twelve in my favorite tomboy garb. Right after my paternal grandma took me to an eye doctor for the first time in my life. #fostergirls #driven #tbt #ittakesalifetime #rambler #writersofinstagram https://www.instagram.com/p/B5I5oaYB-7_/?igshid=ve8bsjzdb3dp