Hello dear reader,

For this illustrated letter I am going to try something else and share ten things that have caught my attention lately. I know there is so much more we could talk about, the world being a hot mess at the moment, but I never feel I’m quite the right person to do so publicly and prefer sticking with things that are so universal, they cross any boundary or political divide (like feelings… everyone has them!).

Two tiny risograph prints from my webshop.

10 things I enjoyed lately, or that have kept me busy:

1. Book: I’ve started reading The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron again, and have been writing morning pages almost every day (at least for the first few weeks, before the holiday started). I do feel that writing on a regular basis and ‘listening’ to my own voice rather than looking outside of myself for input and answers, is very helpful and creating a sense of flow in my work. The writing prompts and weekly artists dates do feel a little too time consuming and like a luxury I can’t always afford, so I try to just see it day by day. Sometimes I ‘cheat’ by using the time I write morning pages to work out ideas, or sketch thumbnails (do you also trick yourself into working sometimes by pretending you are doing something else?)

2. Exhibition: I visited FOAM, the photography museum in Amsterdam, combined with a city walk (one of the ‘artist dates’ I did manage). I was moved by the autobiographical and narrative exhibition Father, by Diana Markosian and An unfinished world, showcasing work by Saul Leiter. I felt elated and like I was teleported back to the time I was still studying at the Rietveld Academy, when I had lots of time to wander around the city, go to exhibitions and collect moments in time with my camera, focusing on details and framing my observations of the world around me.

   

3. Film: The Salt Path. Based on the memoir by Raynor Winn with the same title.

4. Creative process and play: I’ve used some of the torn paper that Margaret Sturton left for me after her visit and have enjoyed playing around with shapes and colour pencils without any purpose. Allowing a little bit of play into my practice to keep it flowing… I haven’t really applied her strategy of silencing the inner critic yet (see previous post). I’ve come to the realisation that I often postpone decision making and just start working on something (like now: I still have my shoes and jacket on, on my way to go to my studio to start my working day, but have plopped onto the sofa instead and just started writing here). Other times I might be focused on an idea or experiment with material but I feel like the real work is still about to begin (usually to do with working out a new sequence or making final artwork). Time will pass and I may have made something I actually like OR I feel bad for not having accomplished something specific.

   Maybe Margie’s pragmatic approach described in my previous post isn’t for me, as my creative spirit (slash neurodivergent brain) seems to long for freedom and escapes to do other things than what it’s told to do. It resists expectations and pressure. Is that relatable? I think that is why I sometimes need to trick myself into working in roundabout ways.

   

5. Podcast: A Bit of Optimism. Simon Sinek and Jacob Collier talk about their creative process. They talked about departure and arrival. About the duality of chaos and order. Resisting and breaking the system we reject and rebuilding it back. Courting an idea “and keep it alive for long enough for it to continue to sort of burn fuel as you move through the process of raw idea, to kind whittled down idea to particularly whittled down idea, into sharing the idea” (Jacob Collier).

   I really enjoyed listening to this conversation as I saw so many parallels with my own practice and picture book making in general.

6. The Easter bunny. I’m still figuring out how I feel about pretending Easter bunnies and the likes are real. I ask my children sometimes what they think, to encourage them to think for themselves, but the presence of these make belief characters are so persistent everywhere, they’ll pick it up anyway. On Easter day I had hid the chocolate eggs and suggested that the Easter bunny had come when they weren’t watching. The next day, I backtracked and said I made it up. “So you lied?” my eldest asked me. Yes, I suppose so.

   She’s still believing in it despite my questioning, because we saw a human-sized one at a playground. Even though I pointed out it was someone wearing a suit, it was very real for my children (and uncanny, in my opinion, as it kept coming back for high fives and fist bumps, as they were the only small children there). It made an impression on my daughter, she really wanted to show her colouring sheet of an Easter bunny and got a thumbs up. This morning, out of the blue, she even asked why the Easter bunny never hides chocolate eggs in our house.

   I’m all in for leaving room for imagination, play and childlike wonder, and yet it doesn’t sit well with me to fuel these commercial traditions, especially when they come with so much waste. I don’t like the idea of lying to my children either.

7. Podcast: De Grote Vriendelijke Podcast, where Jaap Friso and Bas Maliepaard talk with Maria Postema about translation. I was working on the translation of my next picture book, from English to Dutch, and was confronted once again with the fact that I’ve been working and reading in English for so long that I don’t feel very confident about writing in Dutch anymore, at a level I’d like. The word that was the most difficult to translate this time was belonging. If you are a Dutch speaker, you will know there isn’t a direct translation, just variations on what it can mean. It makes no sense to me that we don’t have that word in Dutch as so much of what we do and long for comes from the desire to belong.

   Every time I work on a translation of one of my own books (in close collaboration with Ria Turkenburg, my editor at Leopold, credit where credit is due), I gain new respect for translators.

8. Podcast: Creative Peptalk with Andie J Pizza, talking to Carson Ellis about her book One week in January, in which she illustrated an old diary from when she was 25 years old. It’s incredibly funny and moving at the same time. It again functioned like another portal to an older version of myself as I both imagined what I was doing in 2001 (I was 17 and still in secondary school ) and as a 25 year old (having just graduated from art academy at the time).

   From Carson Ellis’ introduction:

   “I’m a carefully stoic diarist, but beneath all the flatness and comic tedium runs a true current of sorrow and longing. This is the diary of a young artist with no money and few prospects. She’s just moved into yet another shabby warehouse, and she’s in love with her best friend, who appears to be in love with everyone but her. From the outside, things look dismal, but her life is brimming with possibility. Sometimes she even knows it.”

   I’ve toyed with the idea of illustrating old diaries before. The only problem I have is I’ve shredded them all 10 years ago (fun little detail: when the paper trash was collected it was a very windy day. I found little pieces of my diary in the cracks of the street for months to come). 20 years ago I apparently had the opposite desire as I typed up all my existing diaries up to that date - I might even be able to find them back on an old laptop. I wanted to extrapolate data from my diaries, ranking words in the order of most used for example, and rewrite them in my own newspeak, where I could censor the more negative expressions of myself and reconstruct and solidify my identity after an exchange at the School of Visual Arts in New York I had just come back from (the things you get up to as an art student...).

9. Book: Wonderworks: Literary invention and the science of stories by Angus Fletcher. I’m still in the beginning of this book which I heard about it in the podcast Unlocking Us of Brené Brown. I just had to buy the book after listening to the interview. It’s a very exciting book to read. I keep relating the literary inventions in it to my own picture books, trying to figure out which ones I could apply in my own work, or have maybe unknowingly applied in previous work. The possibilities are endless. I feel this type of work and thinking are right up my alley - combining my passion for narrative and literature with my desire to create work that can uplift individuals, either by comforting, inspiring or giving more understanding about oneself. In the book, the literary inventions are also linked to neuroscience and how our brains work.

   All I wish for now is a better memory to retain the knowledge and stories shared in the book and the time to read more, research picture books in this context and experiment with all these inventions myself.

10. Creative process and play: I’m looking at doodles and drawings I could turn into risograph prints, and artwork I started preparing for prints already. I have enjoyed playing with lettering in some thumbnail sketches. Maybe I’ll create a series exploring those ideas further.

This illustrated letter may have found you a little later than planned for two main reasons, partly due to a long school holiday with our 2- and 4-year-old, and partly because I have been feeling overwhelmed by the flood of online content (impossible to keep up with if I don’t want to spend the rest of my life glued to my phone). I didn’t feel like adding to the noise, just for the sake of hitting a publishing goal I had arbitrarily set up a few months ago. At the very minimum, I want to share things that feel meaningful, or that spark some joy, for me and hopefully for you as well.

I’m in that weird in between space where I’m unsure if all the effort and time I put into something is going to pay off in the material world (as I do believe that with every ‘failed’ project we actually learn along the way: thinking on paper and editing my thoughts for clarity and readability is a good exercise actually. As is making ‘bad’ drawings out of my comfort zone, trying to figure out perspective for example. Even the book projects that have gone on for months before hitting a wall and being abandoned are informing my work. These ‘failures’ are all excellent teachers, even if they may feel harsh and embarrassing at the time).

Having said all of this, I want to shout out to my first paid subscribers, in particularly my mother who had made a pledge before already. It gave me the initial spark to explore writing and publishing an illustrated letter more seriously. Thank you! Encouragement can go a long way (awkwardly inserting link to become a free or paid subscriber here)…

Do you have any favourite books on storytelling or creativity? Ways to trick yourself into working? Conflicting thoughts and emotions around lying about imaginary creatures? Share your thoughts or any questions in the comments below.

Speak to you next time.

With love,

Eva

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