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Unapologetically Colorful
Artist Alicia Sosa-Provencio talks heritage, motherhood, and a world of color
The vision came to her after she had her first baby.
Like many new mothers — maybe all — Alicia Sosa-Provencio felt herself being consumed by her new role as life-giver and caretaker.
Figuratively, parenting ate up her time and energy, prompting her to leave her teaching job. Literally, her body labored to turn her own lifeforce into milk for the newborn.
The image she saw, as she spent the days with her infant son: the Mother of God, with her own son suckling in her arms.
“I’ve had this vision in me to paint this breastfeeding Virgin Mary since I became a mom eight years ago,” she recalled in a recent conversation for Southwestness. “But I just didn’t feel like I was capable of painting what I saw.”
Although she took painting classes in college, she never had the confidence to call herself an artist. It would take two more pregnancies, three young children, and nearly a decade for her to finally put brush to canvas again and bring her image to life.
The final impetus came in the form of 2020’s pandemic lockdowns. Sheltering at home in Albuquerque with her husband and children, looking for a creative outlet to process the stress of it all, she converted their sunny back room into a studio. After years of paralyzing self-doubt, she finally started to paint.
“I just wanted to get this one piece out,” she says. “And I did! And once I got that piece out, I felt like I was on fire. Like I came back to life.”
Honoring women’s life-giving power
Why this vision, in these years of her life?
“Most nativity scenes I see have a very clean version of birth,” she says. “As a child, I would wonder why Mary was never holding her baby! That really baffled me.”
Her befuddlement at the disconnect between mother and child deepened after she started nursing children of her own.
