process – Emily van Lidth de Jeude

Layers and Layers and Layers: My Process

A painting by artist Emily van Lidth de Jeude: 27 square canvases are arranged into three tilted squares of nine canvases each. They are covered with an abstract watery-looking assortment of pink, orange, purple, brown and warm blue shapes, and include many strands of brown human hair emerging from under the paint. This painting is intended to be rearrangeable. — Requiem/Renewal, a Change/able painting by Emily van Lidth de Jeude

Question: What is your process? What paints do you use and how do you get the layered look?

This question pertained specifically to the work in the change/able show, but the answer relates to everything: Layers!

Both in materials and theory, my work is about layers. Maybe that's just how my mind works. I look at something one way, then turn it around and see the same thing another way. I despise going with the flow, and I'm going to disrupt it. If you tell me how wrong someone is, I'll try to see why they might be right. If everybody hates the rain, I'll organize a mud-splashing adventure. It's my nature to be contrary, and today I'm not going to deny it (but I might some other day, because I'm contrary like that).

The change/able show is all about change: accepting it, and making it happen. So in order to make these multi-canvas pieces, I hang all the canvases up on my studio wall and paint them, usually with a layer of textural acrylic, to begin. I love acrylic because it dries fast, and is easy to create harsh scrappy texture with. When that's dry, I rearrange all the pieces and make another layer, this time of oil. I let it cure, or mostly cure, then rearrange and layer again. Some of the layers are glazes; some are textural, and some involve graphite scribbling, which for me is usually the point that the most emotion goes into the work. I keep making layers until it feels finished, and that can be anywhere from about five to twenty layers. There's a good amount of curing time between many of the layers, so I'm often working on other pieces at the same time.

Basically I've changed things around so much that there is an infinite number of ways to fit the painting together, among which not a single arrangement will be wholly compatible, but all of it is beautiful. Like life. Life changes every time you look at it; emotions, conviction and ideation evolve. We look at things differently as our moods and circumstances change. The reason I work in layers is so that I can get all those many levels of thought and feeling into my work.

Originally published in October, 2019

Emotion and a Big Stick of Graphite

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 autoimmune disease that has never been formally diagnosed but has been explored for decades by my faithful doctor. My symptoms shift and change and I've been through all kinds of potential diagnoses and healing modalities. The one thing I can tell you for certain is when I'm emotionally distressed my body reacts with inflammation. So my doctor sent me to a psychologist who explained to me that my body was harbouring the emotions I wasn't letting out, packing them into various places to manifest as inflammation and dysfunction.

So these days I let the emotions out. I put on the music that either inspired the piece I'm working on or that speaks to the feeling of it; I dance and sing and shout in my studio, I scribble and slash and hit and often push the material I'm using into the substrate with my bare hands. I laugh and often cry. I can't tell you how many times I've left the studio with paint or graphite in my hair and on my face from wiping away tears. I don't care anymore about keeping some kind of respectable appearance. I care that I put everything I had into the piece. I care about getting the damn emotions out of my body and onto the surface or into the dress, or into the words I'm writing.

I hope my emotions reach people. I hope I give people a space to feel and to express and become. I hope we can all find more spaces to emote, to share, to live and love and cry together.

Originally published in September, 2018

My Residency in Amsterdam: Connection and Discovery and Stillness

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 husband, Markus, at Goleb Project Space.*

When I arrived for my residency at Igor and Go-Eun's art centre, I was amazed and delighted to discover that the whole of Project Goleb, which is housed in an old school building, echoed with the same quiet, tentative presence that I know of Igor. My husband and I settled into the residency studio and got to work with Igor, measuring and planning and talking. My usual work ethic is to quickly take stock of my situation, dig deep into my topic through interviews and endless mental planning, sketch up a working physical plan, and then work my butt off without any rest or break until I collapse. Not probably the healthiest way to work, and utterly opposed to the way things seem to go in Igor's world. To say it was a stretch for me to adapt to such an understated way of living and creating would be an understatement!! But it was clearly the modus operandi for all the artists working in the centre, so I had to change.

One day I spent over five hours walking and busing around Amsterdam with my husband (diligent, patient hero of an assistant), looking for the right fabric for the installation we were creating. The constant drone of the cars in the street, the relentless hammering of urban construction on a floodplain, the mill-like humming of people in the various markets we visited – it all felt so numbing and calming. Like a heavy blanket. Igor called my cell phone while we were out and I ducked into an insurance office so I could hear his gentle voice over the din of the street. The employees calmly but firmly pushed me off the premises as I strained to hear him, shuffling back out onto the street, hand cupped around the phone and my ear, the other waving apologetically. I began to feel like I was being bumped around like a stray dog in a crowd, hardly noticed but constantly on the move. I began to wonder if maybe the difference in energy between me and Igor is more a question of urban vs. rural living than anything else. But I got used to it.

We worked, visited, and experimented together and by the time the installation was up I could see my art had changed. Have I changed? The voices of people I had interviewed filled the room with a kind of encompassing drone. The sheets hung limply in the dark, and people who visited didn't laugh and play as they have in previous installations I've done. They stood still and contemplated. They stood among those sheets all quiet and wondering. Some told me later that they left with a feeling of thoughtful stillness. Still, in Dutch, means silent.

It's amazing to discover that I can change so easily, and to discover that I can still create, even in circumstances and emotional states that are new to me. Now that I'm home, I wonder if my work will change in general, or has it always been just a reflection of my surroundings at the time? Thank you, dear Igor, for your enormous contribution to art and humanity, for this residency and the time to spend getting to know you and Go-Eun. Thanks for opening more doors and eyes and hearts. May we continue to find connection.

Originally published in June, 2018

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