To the Guys Who Grabbed at my Crotch: Thank You!

Me at Art! Vancouver.   Painting: Lluis Garriga Filip

In May 2017 I was walking down an aisle of exhibitors at the Art! Vancouver gala, wearing an altered wedding gown from my (dis)robe series. All around the skirt, painted arms reach up from the floor to embrace, protect, or maybe pull the wearer down. That’s me, in this case: The wearer. It’s an open-fronted wedding dress, now that I’ve altered it, and I wore it with a nude body suit, including false pubic hair, made of a discarded brown wig. Women laughed as I walked along; a couple of them thanked me, without saying why. And one of these, who stopped me in my tracks with a desperate-looking smile and wide eyes, held me tightly by the arm and said, “thank you. Thank you for doing this. Thank you so much,” as her male companion leered at me, then squatted down close beside me and tugged at the false pubic hair, his face only inches from my crotch.

You know what I did? Nothing. Because really, it wasn’t all that unexpected. In fact, three different men reached down and handled my wigged crotch that evening. A multitude more said lude things to me. And I did nothing about it. Because they were making a point for me, and their wives were thanking me. Art is always a kind of sacrifice, and I’d rather be sacrificing myself this way, on stage on my own terms, than in the countless ways I do when I simply walk down the street looking female.

My work is intended to make people think about life – the way we live it, and the other people we share it with. Everything I create, whether a very personal abstract painting, an immersive landscape of people telling stories, or a provocative reclaimed wedding gown, is an effort to illuminate humanity so that we see each other and the places we inhabit in new light, with compassion, curiosity, and a feeling of belonging.

Originally posted in June 2017

Nothing Comes Out: Art as Emotional Release

People grieve in so many different ways. My husband just goes quiet. My sister explodes into a firework of love and tears and fury. My other sister calculates and completes tasks. She gets stuff done. My brother hides away behind a straight posture and generous smile. I paint and write.

My Dad died last year, and my mother (who divorced him when I was a baby) suggested I paint flowers. Seriously. I tried. Her thinking was that it would help me recover some joy. But joy is not me. Well not these days, anyway. So I’ve gone back to painting songs. And the first one that came out was silence.

Traumatic would be a fun word to describe many of my childhood memories. I used to have this dream all the time (all the time meaning recurring every few weeks from early childhood until after I had my own children) where someone I loved was being killed and I was screaming for help — but nothing came out. I would wake up full of a adrenaline and with a weight in my chest that was hard to relieve. The unheard scream is a kind of static that imprisons the fear in my lungs and drowns me. I’m tired of painting flowers with this scream caught inside me, so I guess my art is changing, now. Enough of trying to stage other people’s faces and voices in my work, though I still value that and am sure I’ll get back to it. It’s time for me to put my own voice on the canvas, now.

Goodbye silent scream. Hello Emily’s voice.

Originally published in October, 2016

The Importance of Printmaking

I am a printmaker. It’s one of the things I’m proud to say about myself. Printmaking is not just a craft, but a way of looking at the world. And one of my life’s greatest delights is when I can share this craft and lens with others. Today I was fortunate to have the opportunity to share it with a bunch of kids.

How to make a simple dry-point intaglio print:

Two children sitting at a table drawing on zinc plates with sharpie pens.
First scrape down and round off the edges of your plate. Then plan your work with a permanent marker on the plate.
An image of a pair of hands scratching into a white plastic plate with a metal scribe.
Then use an etching scribe to scratch the design into the plate. We used acrylic plates first.
An image of a hand holding a metal scribe and scratching a drawing into a metal plate.
Then we used zinc for the second round of prints. The scribe cuts a groove into the surface that has a burr on one side (and sometimes on both sides). This groove will hold the ink during printing.
And image of a hand holding a metal plate with a drawing and a hole in the middle, and a hand scraping the plate with a sharp-edged tool.
When the plate is run through the press, the wet paper is pressed into all the grooves, and around the plate, giving a noticeable relief to the print. We can take advantage of this by carving the plate to form an interesting 3-D effect when it’s printed.
A child leaning over a metal plate with a tree drawn onto it, and scratching the design into the plate with a metal scribe.
When using only lines for depth of colour, texture, and form, it can take a very long time to get the whole plate finished.
A hand holding a metal scribe, scratching a design into a metal plate.
Some scribes are easier to create deeper lines with, but in the end inking is as much or perhaps even more important to the outcome of the print than the lines themselves.
A smooth surface covered in smears of wet black ink.
Ahhh… ink. Thick and sticky, it needs to be mixed well on the glass plate using little cardboard paddles. I don’t have a photo of the paper, but generally when we start inking a small plate is a good time to start soaking the thick, fibrous intaglio paper. This ensures that the pulp of the paper will be movable and will push well into all the crannies of the plate.
One hand holds a metal plate stable on a table while another hand smears wet black ink into the plate using a square of cardboard.
Then the ink is wiped onto and rubbed into the etching plates.
One hand holds a metal plate covered in a scratched-in image, and ink, while another hand wipes the surface with a piece of paper.
Using a smooth paper, we then have to wipe all extraneous ink off the plate! Technically, all the lines (grooves) should hold the ink while it wipes relatively cleanly from the smooth upper surface. However, the wiping can be tweaked in many different ways to allow for a lot of rich moody tones and layers of depth.
Two children stand at a printing press, one is turning the wheel to move their print through the rollers.
Finally, the wiped plate is laid on the press bed, hands washed (for the umpteenth time in this process!), the wet paper laid carefully over the plate, and then a sheet of newsprint and three layers of wool felt. And then we slowly and steadily run it through the tightly-wound press.
A hand is pulling back a piece of paper from the pressed etching plate, and the printed image is clearly visible on the paper. The image appears to be a simple drawing of trees and mountains.
And this is what it’s all for! That moment when we peel back the paper and discover what we’ve created!! No two prints are entirely alike, and every time we peel back the paper it feels a bit like a gift.

Between 2-hour-long sessions of intaglio practice, we went out for a very wet rainforest picnic, and to see if we could find some nature-made prints. We found our own footprints, first, then the print left by lichen that has fallen off a tree. We found the hole in the ground left by an uprooted tree, and even an owl pellet! We decided it qualified because, like all prints, it’s a mark left by something departed – an impression of the past and a clue about past events.

On a bed of moss, a pile of wet fur and tiny broken bones. It's an owl pellet: undigested parts of prey that an owl coughs up after eating.
Owl Pellet!

Prints often have a feeling of melancholy, because of the inherent absence or loss involved in their making. We breathed on the studio windows and made prints of our faces in the steam. They were gone by the end of the day. It’s good to think about prints; about the impression we leave upon the world and the impact we have. Prints speak also about memory. They remind us that the impression is not always the same as the original. And like memory, every retelling takes on a different character; a different reality. Prints remind us of our importance in the world, of the many different and multifaceted truths, and of the relative changeability of it all.

Originally published in January 2016, by Emily van Lidth de Jeude