After the Flood, painting, fatherhood, and care

This is a Master of Fine Arts thesis support document created to reinforce the work of Joshua deGroot, a father and artist attempting to articulate the possibilities of love, loss, and joy found in caring for young children while maintaining an artistic practice. This work explores expressions of caring masculinity while creating artworks in multiple disciplines, seeking to make visible engaged caring fatherhood. The artist reflects on these themes through independent and collaborative painting, drawing, writing, photo and film, making these themes in parenting visible. The works created are the result of embodied care reflected through image making, and thematic reflections on the themes of fatherhood and its complexities. The paints and drawing tools used are mostly sourced from sites important to the artist and physically embed land and memory into the works allowing the painting to hold layers of meaning while conveying surface affect. The collection of drawings, paintings and film displays a record of time lived in caring relationship between a father and his children and partner, as an act of antipatriarchal relationship. This work draws on bell hooks’ work on masculinity, Sarah Blaffer Hrdy’s writing on fatherhood, and sits in relation to Scott Avett’s work and other contemporary artist/parents creating amidst the obstacle course of childrearing.