If you don’t know how to begin creating for the RezArts Festival or feel you have anything to say, you’re not alone. Be encouraged by artist Emily Verdoorn, who compares creating art to having a quiet conversation. She created this video for the last RezArts Festival. “For me often art making…is an act of contemplation and a kind of giving time and paying attention to the world around me, to things that are perfectly ordinary…”
“I thought, maybe I’m not telling my work what to say about this verse, but maybe I can let my work form me. What if the practice of looking with love toward the world in my everyday experience, helps me to rejoice? What if the attentiveness needed to put pen to paper and trace the lines and edges of things cultivates a kind of patient care in me? What if an openness to what God may be showing me through his creation helps to create in me a posture of constancy in prayer?”
“…If you feel you don’t have anything to say, perhaps take time to listen, take time to pay attention. Take time to practice affection toward the world around you. You’re not alone in this quiet side to making [art]. And maybe it’s the beginning of something which you will discover along the way.”
Emily Verdoorn is an artist from Des Moines, Iowa who recently moved to Wheaton, Illinois. In her work she uses anything from pen and pencil to teabags, inks, thread, or homemade dyes to explore the world of her everyday life. You can find her at emilyverdoornstudio.com and on Instagram or Facebook @emilyverdoornstudio.
