Le Lapin

In 2021 I gave birth to my youngest son and 9 days later my body went into sepsis. Part of my placenta had been left behind. I went to the ER the next day and spent 4 days there as doctors battled the infection spreading through my organs and performed surgery to remove the placenta piece that was causing it all. This event, along with life teaching and raising kids during a pandemic, lead to me developing anxiety.

After a year and a half struggling with its effect on my sleep, my relationship with my husband, my students, and my boys I finally found a therapist that has helped me begin the healing process.
I'm going through therapy using EMDR to help me process the traumas in my life leading up to this event and work through them.

At the beginning of our sessions my therapist talked about how I could think of guardians to protect me as we went back through my past traumas and that is where I began envisioning this piece, which is developing into a series. I have always felt a deep connection to rabbits, so when I thought of a guardian I first envisioned one. The background is the night sky on March 18th, 2021, the night I went into the hospital and the hardest night of the whole event. The gemini constellation, by chance, lined up over the rabbits heart, and when I saw this I thought it would be very fitting to leave it emblazoned over the rabbits heart, since that is my Zodiac sign.

Process

I began with a few sketches trying to solidify my idea. Once I had picked one I used it as a template to transfer my drawing to my wood panel, prepped with watercolor ground. I drew in the constellations from the night I went into the hospital and then painted the background in a golden color. Next I masked all the stars so I could paint the galaxy background and the rabbit.