Emily van Lidth de Jeude

Look all over the news today. Or any day during the past many years. You are likely to come away with a sense of dread, if not fear. Sure, there will be some positive stories, but words like 'decline', 'collapse', 'fear', 'threat' and 'extinction' seem to be everywhere. I personally spend a lot of my time in fight or flight mode: fight the devastation of our civilization's demise, or bake cookies and tell myself (and my kids) we're going to be just fine, while inside telling myself I'm a liar. Maybe I'm not. What if, instead of reminding myself at every turn that we are doomed, I shift the tone towards something more positive? OK, some of you might wonder why this never occurred to me before, and of course it has (hence the cookie-baking), but changing our minds is a slow process, and maybe this is another step on my journey. I was just listening to CBC's Unreserved , where Candace Kaleimamoowahinekapu Galla, o...

I have this huge big massive stick of graphite. I mean it's about the size of a landjaeger sausage. And soft. I keep it wrapped up in leather so I have something to hold it by without sliding around in the graphite, myself. And I use it to attack my work. The giant smudgy dark and soft and hard lines it makes are as enigmatic as my feelings. The biggest reason I'm a hands-on materials artist is emotion. I use art to deal with my emotion, so my art is usually pretty expressive. There's a lot that comes out of the body - feeling through physicality that then gets transferred to the work. I remember my highschool art teacher encouraging me to paint by just holding the very end of a long paintbrush, and I struggled hard with that. I struggled to keep control, until I grew up and realized that she was right: when the conscious mind loses control, the unconscious is still in there, and finally shines, with all its crazy, unpredictable ways. Emotions are freed. I have an autoi...

(Cross-posted from the Rickshaw Unschooling Blog ) When I was in high school there was a poster on the door of my art classroom that displayed the then-ubiquitous 3 R's (Reading, wRiting, and 'Rithmatic) along with a 4th: aRt. I think Mrs Sunday never knew how much that poster influenced my life. In grade twelve I spent nearly every lunch hour in the corner of the art room, using up her acrylic supply for finger-painting, and paint-squirting. To her enormous credit, she let me do it. I still do it, and I encourage everyone to do it - to get as messy and unexpectedly creative as possible with whatever supplies they're given. I spend a lot of time on my other blog talking about explorative wilderness play, but many readers know I'm also an artist and art educator, so I am often asked about "real" art supplies, and what kinds of simple art projects are good for various situations. I feel like it's time I give a nice solid answer to that. Fi...

Back in the 90's -- my art school days in den Haag -- I went over to Igor's flat just so he could give me some tapes he'd made. Good music to take home and feel. Igor Sevcuk walked himself to freedom from the war in Bosnia, leaving family and history and horrors behind. I think maybe we saw a similar brokenness in each other but we were utterly different. While my need to process my past makes me loud, Igor seems to live on a quiet, flat plain, processing and processing and processing. His mind and creations are full of contemplation. And out of this comes a kind of full-force storyline, like a chugging steam engine heading down the tracks, slowly but fast enough you can't let go. His art is captivating, and always leaves me wanting to understand. With his understated creativity he has been a recipient of the Prix de Rome, and he now runs the Goleb artist centre in Amsterdam with his equally fascinating, thoughtful, and generous partner, Go-Eun Im . Igor and my hus...