“My work—not just as a visual artist but as a mother, and as a human on a planet flying through space towards inevitable death—is how do we become more present? How do we get into our body? How do we stay in the moment? How do we emote through expression?”
An artist, educator, and creative entrepreneur, Morgan Jones Johnston has always been deeply connected to her own creativity. But when she became a mother at 30, life bloomed anew. After years of putting other priorities above her art practice, she dove headfirst into painting again, compelled by a creative transformation that occurred “practically overnight.”
Her work became larger, more vibrant, more alive. After years of working in a monochromatic world of black and white, color began to surge in. Morgan attributes this shift to the experience of bringing a child into the world—an act that reconnected her with the primal, uninhibited self that lives inside her, inside all of us. A self that is born creative. “The creative process of birthing a human reconnected me with that in a really radical way,” she told me over a phone call.
As a writer and maker myself, I often think about creativity as a birthright rather than an inheritance—a sentiment that runs through Morgan’s life and work. But I had never considered how motherhood might offer a new lens into the self and soul in the same way that the act of painting, drawing, or shaping a ball of clay can bubble inner messages up to the surface.
The “wild and magical” process of giving birth, as Morgan describes it, might just be life’s ultimate, most transformative act of creative expression. As it turns out, there’s a rich lineage of literature—spanning feminism, psychoanalysis, memoir, and art theory—that explores this very concept. Poet and feminist Adrienne Rich, in her seminal 1976 book Of Woman Born, describes motherhood as a creative force that shapes every human experience. She argues that its power has long been restricted by the institution of motherhood—defined by patriarchy and too often overlooked or dismissed as a serious topic of inquiry.
“Theories of female power and female ascendancy must reckon fully with the ambiguities of our being,” Rich wrote, “the potentialities for both creative and destructive energy in each of us.” To counter the limiting beliefs placed upon women, Rich urges readers to “imagine a world in which every woman is the presiding genius of her own body.” The ownership and autonomy she demands is not one of blind confidence but unflinching vulnerability—a confrontation with the ambiguities of womanhood, shaped in part by the daily emotional and physical shifts brought on by menstruation. Early motherhood catapulted Morgan into this reckoning, prompting a “sudden, radical facing of myself” as all the identities she had worn up until that moment came crashing down.
In surrendering to the unknown, in refusing to force that which can’t be controlled, Morgan’s creative inclination quickly shifted into a calling, as did the beginning of the rest of her life as a mother. This surrender wasn’t passive, it was intuitive, mirroring the way young children move through the world: with trust, instinct, and presence. As Morgan pointed out, when children make art, they don’t think, they act, making defined brushstrokes without hesitation or control.
Eleven years after giving birth to her son Tennessee, Morgan sees herself as equal parts mother and artist—two sides of the same coin, each informing the other. Working under the unapologetic business name Rugged and Fancy, her creative output runs the gamut, spanning expressive, joy-filled paintings, to art education workshops and live portraiture sessions, all of which keep her creative life full and her wisdom sharp.
Morgan equated her practice to a blooming flower, which blooms magically, without self-consciousness—never capitulating to outside forces or prescribed expectations. Both “horrible and wonderful,” its similarities to the act of giving birth are striking, she observes. Indeed, her expressive, movement-filled paintings are full of a beautiful chaos—like a journey into the soul, they wind and bend instinctively. When I look at the loops and swirls in her large scale abstraction, I see bramble vines, thorned and tangled yes, but thriving.
Watching Tennessee play in her studio over the years has helped Morgan access her own child-like spirit, which also happens to be her artistic mission: a “search to find full presence while also moving in symphony” with the child inside. There may be chaos in her brushwork, but there’s also a lucid certainty—a rare balance of spontaneity and beauty that’s hard to come by in contemporary expressionism, putting her paintings in conversation with giants like Joan Mitchell. Experimenting with colors that may not be considered complimentary, Morgan’s mark making is bold, raw, and sudden, often loosely rendering flowers, face, and female bodies.
No recent body of work captures the “full presence” Morgan aims to achieve—this harmony between mother and artist—more powerfully than the collection of four paintings she created for our Alice in Wonderland Art Novel last year. Drawing on the curiosity, inquisitiveness, and unfiltered expression of Lewis Carroll’s precocious protagonist, Morgan invited Tennessee to collaborate on a painting titled Youth’s Mark on the Passage of Time, in which it’s nearly impossible to distinguish her brushstrokes from his. Hanging the canvas at Tennessee's eye level, she gave her then 10-year-old complete freedom and autonomy to leave marks of his own choosing.
The first thing he painted? The word MOTHER, in wide, bold scrawls that became the focal point of the piece. After that, she laughs, came birds and stick figures with exaggerated anatomy, a noticeable departure from the formless doodles of his early childhood days. An important shift in his mark-making had taken place, as he assessed what he would paint, and how. “It was cool, it was heartbreaking, it was a deeper bonding for us because it really, for me, represents this transition from childhood to adolescence,” she reflected.
As a contemplative counterpoint to Tennessee’s lettering, Morgan wrote on the canvas in childlike script, “I do not want to be small,” giving voice to her refusal to shrink or silence the expansive creativity that motherhood—and painting—have helped her reclaim. Morgan credits the collaborative experience as “a full circle” moment, a reminder of the ongoing importance of her own journey inward, away from the prescriptive thinking of adulthood.
A year later, Youth’s Mark on the Passage of Time continues to serve as a personal reminder for Morgan: that while life may not follow a straight line, time does pass. And if we can resist the systems that deny people ownership of their time, as Morgan points out, there is a chance to move through life more fully, more freely. This means embracing the ambiguity of motherhood and artistry alike—and allowing both to bloom wildly.
To Learn more about Morgan Jones Johnston, visit her website and Instagram, sign up for her weekly newsletter Rugged and Fancy Dispatch, or purchase her e-book, CREATE ANYWAY: The Average Person’s Guide to Igniting Your Creative Spark.
