This is not AI. This is a photo of my hand drawing a portrait of three young men, with a reference photo open on my laptop, beside it. So it's a photo of a drawing of a photo! This photo was taken by an artist: me, Emily van Lidth de Jeude. I interviewed the young men and got them laughing together, to create a happy memory from which to draw their portrait. I photographed them during the interview. I then communicated with their family to determine how the final portrait would look. I then drew their portrait, and communicated more with their family to ensure the final product was what they hoped for. Then I sent the portrait to an art printer, who made a print of it, for their grandmother. Then I packaged up the portrait and delivered it. I spent dozens of hours creating this portrait, and the family evidently loves it. Why? Because it's real. It's their children. It shows a real moment of happiness and connection. It shows love. And it's not AI.
And now this image is an illustration for a blog post I'm writing, myself. Also not using AI. These thoughts are actually fully my own. These words are they way I think them, in my own mind, and share them with you.
This morning I received a blog post written by a person whose work I admire, illustrated by OpenAI. It's so depressing to see intelligent, thoughtful people write wonderful essays, and illustrate them with AI. As an artist whose work has been scraped, I say 'thanks for nothing'. No pay for our work; not even credit to the artists' work used by the AI.
I'm performing one of my wearable art pieces at the Museum of Vancouver in March and they're pointedly paying me properly for my work, as well as providing human-created promotional material around the event. It shouldn't be amazing to simply be respected and paid for my work, but these days it definitely feels amazing.
Kudos to all the people out there still respecting artists' and writers' work; still seeing our world as a community of creative, resourceful minds, instead of workers on a treadmill run by AI.
Tripping a little over an unexpectedly-high tuft of moss on the log I was stepping over, I heard shouts from the children, up ahead, and looked up to walk smack into the dangling tips of a soft wet cedar bough. I brushed the water off my face as the shouts were joined by gasps of horror or awe, and then guttural, powerful noises, and a loud “YEAH!!” As a small arm jutted up above the ferns that still stood between me and the kids, holding a rather long piece of deer-spine, that then fell apart in mid air, dropping a piece of itself unceremoniously back to the forest floor. The kid holding it up looked a little disappointed, but continued smiling, as they and their classmates experienced what was, for some, the first sight of a nearly-complete deer skeleton.
Some of the kids gathered as many bones as they could carry; some fought for their perceived rights to the skull; the spine; those amazing paddle-like shoulder-blades that always seem to become useful tools in the hands of ten-year-olds accessing their powerful, primal nature. Some stood back looking alarmed, and one kid was wearing the pelvis as a hat. A wide-eyed girl ran up to me with a piece of the bottom jaw, pulling a tooth back and forth in its socket. “It comes out! Emily, the tooth comes out!” She exclaimed. “It comes out and it fits back in!” Was she amazed by the perfection of the way bones fit together, or by the access to an understanding of her own teeth; those things that had come out of her mouth with some celebration, and then grown there again, anew? Maybe she was just amazed at the tactile delight of it all.
Tidying up today for this weekend's open studio, I dusted around my bone collection, as usual. There were a few dead flies on them, as well as a few spiderwebs, and thankfully not too much dust, because dusting feathers—and especially that desiccated dragonfly—is a pain! Every time I pick up the rat skull, one of its massively long curled incisors tumbles out and I have to slide it back into that channel that grew to fit it perfectly, when the rat was alive.
Most visitors to the studio just come to buy a painting and don’t even seem to notice the bones, but I want them to look clean, anyway, because there’s something kind of yucky about dusty bones that’s improved by being cleaned. And anyway, sometimes people do notice them, and ask about them. I'm always a little nervous to divulge that I actually almost never draw or paint from these. Some people assume I do, and I guess I might think the same of another artist; imagining her like Georgia O'Keeffe, describing all the beauty of these things in charcoal and paint. But no. They mean so much more to me than just a subject to make a picture of.
When I clean the bones, I’m reminded of their differences and similarities. I have a rat skull from the compost (caught by our cats and delivered there to decompose, by me) and a beaver skull that my brother found down by the creek. Both have those amazingly long, curled incisors. You can imagine how, as the rat chews away at the wood of the chicken coop, or the beaver gnaws the trees down by the creek, they’d wear them away and need that long reserve to keep growing in. It also reminds me why it’s so important to give pet rodents something to chew. Compare that to the teeth in my deer skulls that look more like barnacles; not meant for cutting through wood at all, but just gnawing on their tough fodder of grasses and my roses, if the gate is left open. If they fall out they take a while to regrow. Unlike shark teeth. The little baby hammerhead jaw my daughter’s friend brought from Mexico is a reminder that a shark can’t go long without its teeth, so it keeps an entire collection of them behind each pointy front tooth, just waiting to move up into place, when space is made. I’ve known some children who had what we called “shark teeth”—baby teeth that never fell out but just stayed there in front of their growing adult teeth. They feel to me a bit like backup-teeth. Not like the canines on that otter skull. They have no backups, waiting. I imagine if otters break a canine they’d suffer for a while. Maybe that’s why they’re so vicious. They can’t afford to lose a fight. The teeth of these skulls have such stories to tell, as much in the ways they’re similar to each other and to me, as in how different they are. Different lives; different needs; different priorities. But still with the same basic bodily needs.
You’d think there’d be few similarities between all these toothed animals and the bird skulls I have, or the barnacles and bivalves. But I see the similarities there, too. The beak of the eagle is in many ways a bit like its talons; you know how easily it would puncture and tear the body of that little flat-beaked songbird, holding one half under a talon and hooking the other half with its beak. The songbird’s skull is so light I can blow it off my hand by accident while trying to get the dust off. It’s made to fly. And that’s how it escapes the eagle.
The barnacle, of course, looks like a molar. Of course we know barnacles are filter-feeders, reaching out their elegant and feathery feeding legs to catch floating foods under the waves, but then why are they shaped like teeth? If you’ve ever stepped on one in bare feet you’ll know why. It’s protection. Same with a shark, or an otter. One of the ways human children defend themselves is by biting. That’s what teeth are for, too! And the bivalves. Nothing about them can be considered tooth-like, it seems, until you remember that there are razor clams. You don’t want to step on those, either! And sometimes, on shells, I find the little curved bits at the edge and remember that that’s where the clam’s mouth comes out to feed, or sometimes its foot. Because clams walk through sand. And fast, too, as you know if you’ve ever tried to dig for one.
I look at all these bones and other body parts, and I feel connected to the world. I feel joyful that in our great diversity, we’re still all related; that our bodies have evolved to succeed in diversity and community. In this collection I also have lichens that remind me of our strength in living collectively with other species; I have conifer "berries" (not actually berries; I don't know what they are) that usually grow unnoticed in the tops of enormous trees, but which I collected off the ground. They remind me that there are beautiful processes we hardly notice for their being out of our usual sight, until a storm comes and knocks us all sideways, and we see things differently. I remember that all change is growth; even death. I remember that there is joy in just the smooth feeling of these bones; their lightness and their heaviness, the things I understand about them and the things that are mysterious to me. I remember the delight that I or others had in finding them, and I feel the sorrow that these lives ended, and the comfort of knowing our commonalities; the aliveness of just knowing we exist. I think of these things and I remember that everything is beautiful.
This has become one of my favourite things to do. Every year I go out and label the weeds and trees in the place with the highest foot-traffic on our island.
I hope people see these and begin to notice a bit of the world around them in ways they may not have, before. I hope people also go home and find the same weeds, there. Sure, it's the simplest kind of art.
I'm just chalking rocks, walls, and sidewalks with plant names! But I really feel it might be one of the most impactful works I've done.
And yes, if you're wondering, I do have municipal permission to do this! So the credit for this also goes to open-minded officials and other citizens who can appreciate the benefits of art and education in our communities. 🙂
As artists, we have the power, ability, and honour of building our future civilization. Some of us may be doing so intentionally; many not. But whether we're aware of it or not, we are responsible.
Sci-fi is often touted as predicting the future. But does it? Writers and other artists imagine plausible eventualities based on current directions and capabilities… and then they often happen. Maybe the artists are soothsayers, or more likely we're just creative… and humans have evolved by being resourceful. If we're given a wild idea, we take great pleasure in making the seemingly impossible happen. So maybe artists are visionaries. That's not a pat on the back. Most of us want to be seen as visionaries, I suspect, but it's a huge responsibility.
What are we putting out into the world? Books, movies, and other art that may very well have been intended to warn us away from a dystopian future might instead be creating it; putting the ideas for such dystopia into our minds so that our resourceful society will create it. I'm not talking about some evil genius who sits in their dark basement playing apocalypse video games and then thinks, "ooooh I could destroy the world… bwahahahahaaaa!" I'm talking about all of us becoming gradually more and more accustomed to seeing and hearing about such dystopian events so that as they happen, we don't stand up and stop them.
What are artists supposed to do? Become blind Pollyannas and make fluff? Cotton candy dreams with no real plot and no intrigue? No, of course not. Nobody would look, at all. People like to look at what terrifies us. And art needs to deal with our problems, too; not just look the other way. I'm totally not immune to creating work that deals with humanity's pain and failings. But I also feel that we need to be creating work that posits hopeful futures. We need to be imagining the world we want to see, instead of the one we're afraid of.
And luckily, we have nature to look at, for inspiration. Nature is resourceful and opportunistic and ruthless. And extremely beautiful. The whole of nature evolves because of these things, and humans are definitely part of that whole. Nature limits itself simply because it's impossible to keep living if one devours all one's resources at once. I keep an ecosystem-integrated food forest around my home, which teaches me this every year. This year we're having quite an infestation of flea beetles. In previous years it was cabbage moths and one year–spectacularly–it was mourning cloak butterflies. But each of these infestations either destroys it's own habitat and thereby starves itself out, or attracts some kind of predator that eats it alive. Nature limits greed. So, despite my current paltry pea crop, due to the flea beetle infestation, I'll still have food, because my garden is diverse, and next year I don't expect to have such an issue with flea beetles. They've destroyed so many of their resources and attracted so many predators that they can't be such a problem, next year. Humans are in the process of self-limiting, as well, painful though it is for us as individuals.
Contrast my garden flea beetle situation to a garden where all that's planted is peas (because: monocrop=money). The flea beetles now threaten the entire garden, as opposed to just the peas and the odd brassica or tomato, here and there. So now all we see as farmers is the flea beetle problem. And we blast them all to hell with pesticides. Now we have peas, and we make money, but we're poisoning ourselves and the land, and most of the other species that live on it. So in a couple of years of this practice, we've devastated our ability to grow peas, or perhaps anything at all on that piece of land, because we no longer have the diversity of life needed to sustain… life.
It doesn't take much vision to see that that way of farming (or living, or envisioning our human future) is hopeless. It takes a little more vision to imagine and create a hopeful future.
As an artist, I'd like to be one who plants more diversity, in preparation for new ways of living, instead of just imagining bleak futures for us to tumble numbly into. Humanity might indeed extinguish itself by imagining negative futures. But the life of this planet will go on. Yes, it will be utterly changed, because human folly is powerful, and we're destroying life at an ever-increasing rate. But some kind of collection of species (likely including some humans) will carry on beyond our rather short-lived civilization, and will develop its own rich community of life when it settles into the cradle that this planet offers. This new collection of species will imagine itself and grow into what it imagines. And, like my garden, the more diverse this new ecosystem is, the more resilient it will be.
I love to feel the responsibility of such a future. Let's imagine!
It happened like this. Just after we discussed the stage floor I was painting, the director cycled back to my house and knocked on the door again. "Emily?" He called into my house. "Emily, I forgot to ask. Could you make us a rooster prop? It's to look like it's been killed by a fox. Although that may or may not have actually happened."
I was astounded! And thrilled!! "Of COURSE I can!!" I knew the play was pretty serious — Dancing at Lughnasadh. So this prop was a serious prop. Well… as serious as a pretend killed rooster can be, I guess. I was deeply honoured that the director thought I'd be up for the task.
There is no way I can easily make a fabric rooster puppet that looks real, and dead. So the first thing to do was to find a rooster that was headed for a pot, anyway. I was given this guy. He was sadly doomed, after his owners had searched for a home, to no avail. So on the appointed day, I picked him up, thanked him for his donation to my freezer and the arts, and butchered him. He made meat, bone broth, liver pate for me to eat, and a pair of feet and a beautiful feathered pelt for the prop. I tried saving his beak, too, but didn't like how small and dark it was, and decided that this rooster prop was going to need a yellow beak.
Working the hide.
I've plucked and slaughtered a LOT of chickens in my life, and plenty of rabbits, too, whose skin comes off so easily, like peeling off a knee-sock from a foot. Rooster skin–with feathers, wings, and tail attached, is not like that!! It took some careful consideration to get it done properly, bones removed (all but the Pope's nose and the wing-tips), and with all the feathers still in tact.
I worked a long time to get the skin clean, and then I tried to dry him. I've never done taxidermy before, and it turns out a bird is not the easiest thing to start with. Then it turns out I also have no experience. Oh wait–I said that already. But it turned out to be a problem!! And this bird was fatty. I managed to dry his feet OK, but ended up removing the wings and tail feathers, as well as the ruff and saddle feathers. Ugh. All that work keeping his skin together, just to take him apart in the end!!!
Anyway, I made him a body out of old terrycloth and felt, and a bit of armature wire for a basic spine and rib structure; broken sate skewers sewn into the wings, too. I first made his wattle out of felt, but it looked awful, so ended up making a more floppy one of red velvet with rocks inside for that floppy weight a rooster's long wattle can have. He has rocks in his head, too, so it can dangle down, limply. Appropriately for a dead guy. If you know, you know. The wings had to dangle, too, when he's turned upside down and hung by a foot.
Sewing the rooster's head out of terrycloth and felt.
Another part of dead roosters–especially those that may have been killed by a fox–is the protrusion of some guts. You know if you've cleaned a rooster, you reach in and grab the gizzard, and then the liver and intestines come out along with it. I didn't make this guy a gizzard, but I did make him some intestines and a liver. And I filled the intestines with lentils to make them dangle properly. Well, I hope he enjoyed his meal.
Various rooster parts in progress, waiting to come together.
Then I had to sew on his feet and wing parts, and many many many feathers, both real and made of felt. I also painted his face and beak. Way better.
Sewing his hundreds of tiny white felt feathers on!
So… Here's my dead rooster prop! I hope you like him. I put up a video on my MakerTube if you'd like to see the finished puppet:
Woman Story: Untitled 7 Artist: Emily van Lidth de Jeude
I once installed a show called Woman Story here in my home community. The core of Woman Story is a series of 24 portraits of bald, naked women drawn with graphite, crayon and acrylic wash onto reclaimed panels from my own home. They're actively expressing a complex array of experiences that inform woman-ness, but anonymously, because each of our stories might belong to any one of us.
At some point, a local I know distantly ‒ a retired judge and art collector ‒ came in to the gallery and sat down on the bench near the door. He stayed for about forty minutes. I eventually went to sit with him, and asked him what he thought of the show.
"Oh, I'm not here for the show." He answered. "I'm waiting for my ride."
"Ah. I see." What was I supposed to say next?
But he continued. "Is this your work?" He asked, bluntly.
"Yes."
"Well it's awful. An insult to women."
Woman Story: Untitled 18 Artist: Emily van Lidth de Jeude
I was completely shocked, but also curious, and asked, "Why do you feel that way?"
"They're bald," he answered, point blank. "Why would you be so disrespectful to women?"
"I drew them without hair in order to make them anonymous; to remove an identifier, and so their hairstyle doesn't speak to any potential prejudice or assumptions we make about people's hairstyle choices. But also to make their stories about everywoman."
He never once looked at me while he spoke. "They look like the bodies that came out of Buchenwald," he said. And then he was silent. And soon afterwards, his ride came.
Obviously, I could see his point. And, despite feeling regretful about possibly triggering trauma in people (my family definitely also carries trauma from WWII), I feel like maybe it's not a bad thing to have made this connection in my work. Because in war, women are also casualties. Women are also contributing to and leading both the offensive and the underground support systems. Women did come out of Buchenwald, dead. And women are found in shallow graves, abandoned vehicles, hospitals and landfills all over this world. It truly is awful, and I guess that's why I feel it needs to be told.
Here we are on the brink (or over the brink?) of WWIII, at the same time as we're experiencing a rise in femicide, exploitation, abuse and violence against women. It's not a coincidence. In our greed-based apathy we have allowed a very small handful of men to own and control our world. Most obviously, that's not acceptable! And what do strong women do when a situation is not acceptable? We make change. Women all over the world are protecting the vulnerable and building systems for survival, protection, and recovery, even as the war is only getting started.
Generally speaking, women are fully half of the world's population that knows from a deep generational place what exploitation, vulnerability and violence looks like ‒ and how to both survive and heal it. We're working throughout our communities, already, to build peace and resilience; to educate, support, and empower. Even to empower the women who foolishly allowed their fear to make them hate. We're working to bring and keep people together.
Woman Story: Untitled 16 Artist: Emily van Lidth de Jeude
We cannot rest. As born survivors, it's our strength and duty to not become bald bodies in concentration camps, mass graves, or landfills; to make sure our sisters, brothers, and children are also safe. To de-escalate fear and reactionary hatred before it harms us. A lot of us are already experienced with this. The rest of us can learn. We have to deal with our own crap and become our best selves, in order to show up for our world. And we have to start now.
There's work to do! I'm not talking about just directly protecting and defending, although there's a need for that, as well. I'm talking about building the world we need, so that it displaces the world of hate and greed that is being fed right now. And there are infinite ways we can do this. Some of us are out putting our bodies and voices on the line; putting ourselves in danger to inform and advocate. Some are donating money, time or skills to organizations that amplify our voices and work. Some of us are building networks and repositories for the protection of people, environment, information, culture, and as a whole, the future of our world. Some are educating and supporting our communities, so that we can have and maintain peace. And all of us, no matter what our lives look like or how limited we feel, can make conscious choices in every act we make to defy and devalue hatred, to promote love and peace, and to pull away from systems, corporations and ideologies that promote hatred.
Even when we feel weak, we can be strong. We are all challenged; women and men, too. That doesn't mean we're beaten. A challenge is, by definition, an opportunity to overcome. That's not just where we're at right now; it's who we are.
We are strong. We are capable. We are determined. We can do this.
"Three Craws", oil and graphite on 3 stretched canvases. Emily van Lidth de Jeude
Songs of the Apocalypse is a series I’ve been working on since around the time my birth father died. He had lived a long time with Parkinson’s, but the circumstances of his death in hospital, while recovering from spinal surgery, are a complete mystery, and in that post-shock landscape of fear, confusion, and a resurgence of shallow-buried family traumas, his side of my family fell apart. So this series of paintings began as a way for me to deal with my emotions of that time. But of course those personal issues are deeply intertwined with the societal issues we all live with: helplessness in the face of climate change, capitalist, colonialist and patriarchal damage, global societal upheaval, and the fallout from those things. For example, many of my own childhood experiences are a direct result of my grandparents’ war traumas. Two of my grandparents come from families fleeing war and famine in Ukraine and Ireland. Others recently lived here through the great depression, and all of these unknowingly stored those experiences in the many generations to come. So those bigger-picture problems filtered down through the generations to effect even my own children’s health and genetic makeup, a hundred years later. Divorce, childhood trauma, and family strife are just microcosms of the bigger picture. So in dealing with individual portraits I’m also looking at our society as a whole. In looking at the wounds and the healing, I’m hoping to create psychological pathways for us all to heal from the greatest struggles we face.
My parents did everything they could to support me, given the understanding and tools of our time. They created a safe and nurtured life for me on a small island, and they continue to support me in my adulthood. But life cannot be perfect. Life is not about good and bad, but about all people constantly growing. And growing looks very messy.
"(I open my mouth and) nothing comes out", oil and graphite on stretched canvas. Emily van Lidth de Jeude
The circumstances of my childhood were not what we consider to be ideal, but they’re also not at all uncommon. Like many of us, I live with intergenerational traumas from histories of war, colonialism, famine, and domestic abuse. These things are rarely spoken about, as our culture tends to look down upon expressing too much emotion or speaking about emotionally challenging topics. But the effects of my buried experiences are borne in my body as autoimmune diseases, and they’re in my paintings. The image above is one of the first I painted in the Songs of the Apocalypse series. It’s a depiction of my own face as it appears to me in dreams, screaming for all I’m worth to help the people I love (who are always suffering horrible fates in my dreams)… but no sound is coming out. And nobody hears me. As an artist I’m trying to break that helpless invisibility, not just for me but for all of us.
I am a woman in a world where one in three women has been the victim of physical or sexual violence, usually by a partner or close family member. So think of three women you know. Which one is it? Think of twelve women you know. How many of the four has told you their stories? I am a woman in a world where women are not only not expected to achieve, but are taught not to expect ourselves to achieve. A world where we’re expected to be happy to just survive.
"Will You Love My Heart", oil and graphite on 8 stretched canvases. Emily van Lidth de Jeude
I don’t call myself a survivor because I want to do more than survive. This is a portrait of me at one, four, eleven and sixteen. It’s called Will You Love my Heart, and is painted to Sinéad O’Connor’s song, Love is Ours. It’s on exhibit July 24-August 18 at the Silk Purse Gallery in West Vancouver. As a synaesthete, I usually paint music, but not just any music. The song that inspires a painting will have a very specific meaning associated with my own memory, so what I’m painting is my visual experience of that song combined with my own memory and emotion. Love is Ours is about holding onto the pieces of our broken hearts and keeping each other alive. In our boxes of personal experience we grow out into the rest of the world, and then will we be loved? Or shoved back down into our private little trauma boxes? I’ve spent my whole life since my teens trying to get out of that box, to find love and healing, and grow into the many links between my heart and yours (yes you—we’re all connected).
I figure it’s a good idea to let my voice come out now, share my progress and hopefully inspire billions of others to do the same. That’s why I’m finally beginning to show the Songs of the Apocalypse series.
So think of those women again. Those 12 women, four of whom have been assaulted. Maybe you’re one of them. Maybe your child is, or your partner or your mother or your dearest friend. What can you do in this moment to raise her up out of the box built of her trauma? What can you do to break the walls of the box? How can you change even one thing about the space you give her; the voice you give her; the respect you give her, that could help her find her own way out of the box? And how does your love make her strong?
I’m a feminist artist with a loving, evolving male partner and a strong, courageous daughter, and an extremely emotionally-aware son. Being the strongest I can be strengthens the foundations for everyone, including all genders, ages and classes of people. It even will combat climate change, colonialism, the patriarchy, and capitalism, because as I become stronger I can lean less on the cultural norms that hold up those false shelters. Creating a world where I can come out of my box and thrive means creating a world where everyone can thrive. Equality doesn’t mean bringing anybody down. It means using the pathways created by love to hold each other up.
"Chain Dress", acrylic and stains on an altered child's dress. Emily van Lidth de Jeude
I sometimes wonder why everything I paint recently, and somehow even the installations I do, gets a clouded overlay. It's oil paint, white fabric, soft white light; whatever. I keep washing everything away into a purposeful obscurity. (Except my portrait of my Ukrainian Grandma releasing her war trauma. For that I made the obscurity first, and she came out of it. That's a strange happening!) Recently I also found out I have cataracts, apparently caused by the various courses of prednisone I've been subjected to over these last 3.5 years of struggling with long COVID. Blah. Great. Not the news you want, as an artist! But even more recently I realized I might be replicating my own clouded cateract vision in my work. Huh.
I mean, part of me wants to embrace that (since the inflammatory effects of my long COVID also mean cataract surgery is not recommended), but part of me is still looking for a deeper meaning. And the white thing has been going on in my work for longer than I've had cataracts. I think I found my deeper meaning, during this current fire-season. It's self-silencing.
We live in a world full of fear, watching homes and towns and futures burn and flood and life just get harder and harder. And the best comfort we can give ourselves is to wrap up in the status quo. Get a latte from a huge corporate entity and watch some non-reality on Netflix. We Canadians aren't even allowed to share the news anymore (Meta: Working to silence the world!)
(I open my mouth and) Nothing Comes Out, 2016
I've been passionately determined to change the status quo since I was a kid, but people get defensive if I talk about change. People write off my personal status-quo-breaking experiments (unschooling, regenerative farming, rejecting many popular conveniences in an effort to live sustainably) as impossible for most, or, even worse, "crazy". I feel so frustrated; so unheard, and so afraid of losing community support (and friends!) because my voice has been too loud; too radical. So I'm trying to shout my meaning while simultaneously silencing myself (!) Yeah. That's weird.
Is it necessary? Do I risk being written off like Sinéad O'Connor and everybody else who just couldn't keep silent? Who tried to change us? Or am I getting desperate enough not to care?
Drink Before the War, 2019
I was so saddened by Sinéad's death that I got even quieter. Now I'm so infuriated with watching my province burn (the homes of family friends gone, family evacuated and praying they don't lose everything, and my own veggies wilting and dropping in the smoke) while so many continue their world travels, unnecessary purchases, and general adherence to the status quo. I feel like I've been shouting for change my whole life, and my voice is hoarse but still somehow no sound comes out. So today I'm going back to the studio and just see what comes out of my brushes, because I just can't not scream about it all right now.
I don't think I'll stop using white. It's also evocative for me these days of the smoke and ash that's now a part of our every summer. And the blindness with which we're going into the future. My blindness. But I'm going to try to stop silencing myself.
Emily van Lidth de Jeude: "Mum playing guitar", 2022.
1994, Royal Academy of Visual Art, the Hague, Netherlands: My first painting instructor showed up to my studio during the first week and told me to get rid of the acrylics. He pointed to a painting sitting drying under the table, and described the dullness; the surface quickly losing any and all beauty it might have possessed just minutes before. So I did, and have been bonded to a series of ever-more-ecologically-friendly oil paints and mediums ever since.
I've used oils for nearly thirty years now, and I LOVE them. I love the smell, the feeling of them, the way they layer and all the ways I can scratch and draw through them. I grew up as a painter with oils… and in less than two weeks I'll be participating in a live painting event where oils are not an option (not allowed due to VOC's, and also because paintings must be dry and hung by morning!) So here I am teaching myself a new skill in a hurry!!! It turns out very little of my painting style and technique translates to acrylic, so I'm having to reinvent myself.
Anyway, here's my beautiful mama in one of her happy places. She's my first attempt at finding a new style and technique using only acrylics. It didn't go at all the way I thought it would, but I'm getting somewhere I like, anyway. And it's already dry!
This video by Rage Against the Machine x the Umma Chroma brings up something I struggle with a lot in my own work and in the work of people I really respect, like RATM. You try so hard to help people see their own strength in changemaking; their own worth and their own ability to make postive change, then you look out at the crowd of people supporting you, and you know a large percentage don't hear the message. They go home shouting about it, but they didn't hear it. Maybe that's because they didn't go there to be educated–I get that. But we keep telling ourselves, as artists, as educators, as community organizers, that even if just one person in that crowd goes home and makes some kind of positive change, we've been successful, but how is that really enough?
The most successful instagram post I've ever made was an in-progress shot of a dress that's about oppression of women; the objectification of the female body. In a very brief time it got thousands of views, and was worked into a German graffiti artist's work. The vast majority of the people sharing it were men. You know why? Because the breasts of the mannequin it sat on were visible. For the handful of women who felt seen, understood, and the smaller handful of men who understood the message, there were thousands who just consumed it like a piece of meat.
I love this video because they're not allowing us to just revel in the anger of the song and not question our lives, our heritage, our thoughts; our whiteness. Putting out something so blatant runs the risk of people choosing not to watch–of alienating any and all of the audience that didn't already understand or agree. Please watch this video if you think it looks stupid. Watch it if you think you already understand, or you don't need to know. Watch it if you think RATM is too white. Watch it if you think you're too white.
Anyway. These are my thoughts for the moment. This is something I struggle with in life and living and art.
