As part of our image of the month series, we continue to feature artist and adoptee Paul Brian Tovey’s exceptional paintings.
Paul is an adult adoptee who was abused by his adoptive parents as a child, and now campaigns for adoptees to have the legal right to revert back to their birth identities.
Paul has a blog where he posts his art which is titled, Paul Brian Tovey’s Arts Of The Adoptee Going Home, and the image this month is his latest piece. Many of Paul Brian’s artworks include poetry, which can be read on his website alongside the art.
The featured image on Researching Reform’s banner is called Christmas Adoption: Never Going Home – my Christmas card.
Thank you very much to Paul for allowing Researching Reform to showcase his art.
Researching Reform 
Thanks Natasha… I just about have a blog that’s for sure and more stuff will go up on it. I have hundreds of poem/ pages with images and all about the trauma of Adoption and the pain it can cause …. It’s a lifetime for me … It’s not possible to emerge easily from years of an abusive Adoption…Yes I do work in the marginalized areas of human pain about dislocations of identity and abuses ..
Anyway, arts and poems help me and traveling about inside them repairing this angle of trauma and that angle … The glue is mourning and tears .. But that’s fine by me .. I spent too many years not feeling feelings because Adoption shut me down till I was 30 ..Now I can feel again … I claimed that back … That’s primally original …
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Reblogged this on tummum's Blog and commented:
💔😘 Powerful Xx
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I put this up on Facebook so some of my newly found Birth-Tovey-Family (2020) could see it and I added this for all to see :
“Many thanks to Natasha Phillips , Journalist, who has in fact consistently recognised me as who I am, and who I am not, merged together as an awkward paradox of Adoption ….
The Court Order to adopt me was passed on Dec 18th 1959 …. Judgement Day… My birth mother died almost to the day 27 years later when I was finally mature enough to confront her about what she did to me .. December 20th 1986 …
I felt honestly that I had softly handed back her execution of me and she had to own it .. Her life was one of neurotic disorder caused by problems in the family she grew up in – a lack of ability to be empathically healing/caring and her particular traumas of abandonments… She is loved forever by me. Even forgiven slowly….It has to be slowly there is no other way ..
But long ago her Christmas gift to me was death of my place in the family. Unforgettable .. That’s why I am an Artist of sorts .. I “stretched” the image to fit it onto Natasha’s wonderfully reporting blog about family matters, law reform and social care.”
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Thank you for the lovely mention, and for being an inspiration to your community.
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Very nice artwork Paul.
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