Springs Artist, Put On Bed Rest For Pregnancy, Found Solace In Painting

Kristen Somody Whalen was always a painter at heart, but it took some tough times to bring out her inner artist.While coping with infertility issues for about seven years, the former New York City-based photographer—who bought a house in Springs last year with her husband, Seth—began painting still-life portraits of flowers and horses with watercolors a couple of years ago. The switch, she explained in a recent interview, assured her that while she did love photographing fashion and celebrity parties, it was painting that allowed her to truly express herself.

“Because I was doing behind-the-scenes [photography work] for big companies … on those shoots I’d be, like, wait—this is the best I could ever be as a photographer. And while it’s great, and those photographers own islands, because they make so much money, it actually wasn’t ... something didn’t feel right,” Ms. Whalen said. “I just decided: I’m almost 40. I need to be doing what I want to do in my 40s, 50s. So, I just started moving more into full-time art.”

Thirty weeks into her pregnancy, though, a bump in the road occurred.

On the night of May 3, her water unexpectedly broke, and she was transferred from Southampton Hospital to Stony Brook University Hospital so she could have access to a neonatal intensive care unit, or NICU, as doctors knew the baby would be arriving much earlier than expected. And when the baby didn’t come right away, doctors said she needed to spend the rest of her pregnancy on bed rest at the facility.

Ms. Whalen suddenly had much more time on her hands—so much that she was able to delve more into her “funny, kind of alter ego” artistic side and bring back to life a series she created in 2013.

While doctors were applying circulators to her legs one day, she thought, “What I wouldn’t give for a killer pair of heels!” Creativity then struck. She grabbed some paper and a pencil—Mr. Whalen brought her art supplies to the hospital—and began sketching. The result was a picture of a pregnant woman lying in a hospital bed with leg circulators, wearing bright red Christian Louboutins. Her head, though, was a real yellow orchid that Ms. Whalen plucked from a bouquet and attached to the paper.

A flower with legs.

The concept was birthed in Paris in the fall of 2013. At the Jardin du Luxembourg one afternoon, Ms. Whalen had brought an easel, paper and art supplies with her, and decided to paint whatever came to her mind.

“It’s full of flowers there, so I painted a flower—and then I gave it legs, and these incredible stilettos,” she said. “And I looked and it and I’m, like, ‘This is so weird.’ But it caught the attention of some people sitting around me.”

She revisited the idea again in 2014, only that time she placed flowers on the head of a woman on a magazine cover, then posted the mixed-media piece to her Instagram account. The photo gained some traction, and then she began sketching legs and pairing flowers with them more often, but it got to the point where she got too many offers to commercialize them, which she didn’t feel she could do with real flowers. So she dropped the series.

But being in the hospital, on bed rest with nothing else to do but wait for her baby, somehow brought back the quirky works of art.

“I think that the pregnant bellies kind of make them—I think that’s what’s the most exciting,” Ms. Whalen said. “It’s all because my water broke. I’m trying to be a serious artist, and, so, these happened because … I’m in a scary situation where I feel powerless. These powerful, fun, alter-ego images just flow out of me because, to me, her gestures and her freedom and the way she moves her body in a [sense] of, ‘I’m just enjoying my body, every inch of it, in this moment.’ It is possible to live that way all the time. And sometimes, in our scariest moments, I feel, in our hearts, even if we can’t be physically doing it, we can still be doing it.

“That’s what’s so fun about creating these,” she continued. “It’s a way for me to do this when I can’t do this, because this is living.” She gestured to a wall in her hospital room where nearly a dozen pieces she drew were hanging. “She’s knitting while skateboarding in Valentinos. Come on!”

The series, appropriately dubbed “Flowers With Legs,” became a hit with Ms. Whalen’s doctors and nurses, as well as other hospital staff members, and some even helped her brainstorm ideas. One of her doctors suggested a piece where the flower gives birth to babies breath, which, hanging from the wall of her hospital room, accompanies a pregnant flower wearing a bikini, one water skiing, and another popping a wheelie in a wheelchair.

Another one of her doctors had even given her the go-ahead to paint during labor, citing the calming nature of the activity. Ms. Whalen, who gave birth to her son, Stetson Jax, on Sunday, May 29, ended up only sketching a horse, but still posted the drawing to her Instagram account, @kristensomodywhalen, shortly after.

She has since been hanging out with Stetson in the neonatal intensive care unit, where she has added another Flowers With Legs piece to her collection: a flower and her baby riding a whale. “We’re surfing the NICU wave on our pet whale, me in Miu Miu sandals and baby Stetson in his blue Adidas,” Ms. Whalen wrote in the photo’s caption. She is now working on a new series, named after baby Stetson, in which she will draw all of the things she wishes they were doing together instead of being at the hospital.

“Struggling with infertility, it led me back to myself in a certain way,” Ms. Whalen explained. “It’s like, all that I had planned, all that my husband and I had planned, we couldn’t make it happen, no matter how hard we tried. And I really wanted it to happen naturally. But the waiting, wait do you do with the waiting?”

“I think for most women, being told they’re put on bed rest is mortifying, because they have all this other stuff,” she continued. “You can’t do your life from a bed. You can’t necessarily do the thing that gives you the most joy from a bed. But I feel very blessed and fortunate that I found something you can do sitting down, or do almost anywhere.”