Lift Me Up

I used oil pastels on purple paper to create a self portrait. In the portrait, the hands of friends and family around me are supporting me and “lifting me up”.

Willa Kanter ‘26

When a Mother Smiles, She Mourns

A gentle smile is what historians perceive

when they analyze a mother’s past 

and notice how the emotion in her grin

is subtle, jaw rested and eyebrows eased,

expression held in place for hours,

giving her artist nothing but a slight turn of her lips. 

Yet, historians do not perceive how after losing a child, 

she could not fully smile.

Even after the miraculous birth of her second, 

there always must have been

melancholy in her portrait, her artist painting 

a half-empty heart in his Renaissance studio.

A mother never forgets

the kick in her abdomen of a baby girl

long gone as she sits, five feet from

where strokes drag across canvas, and history 

manifests in 30 x 21 inches and a shadowed smile. 

In Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, historians see her

angle her body upright and confident. 

Museum-goers envision a stoic woman, passion forsaken, 

but for her, it was an admission of guilt for

failing her children:

one daughter lost to earth, buried under coarse dirt 

with bloodied tissue and jewels

and another girl sitting across the studio, 

watching the process of ground pigment and oil paint

layer overtop itself with wood-handled sable fur

and the delicate intricacy of an artist’s technique,

wondering why her mother couldn’t smile for her portrait. 

Tatum White ‘25

When a lot of people look at the Mona Lisa painting, they often look at the shadows and technique or debate about what made her smile/not smile. I wanted to push further into her story past the stories and theories into what her life was actually like, and I found out that she had a miscarriage not too long before Da Vinci painted her. From this perspective, I wanted to create the narrative of a mourning mother who has to put up a front for the sake of others, even though she's hurting inside.