Emily van Lidth de Jeude

Gratitude to Magda Davitt (Sinéad O'Connor) for her beautiful song Love Is Ours, which I listened to on repeat while painting this. This is my self portrait, at one, four, eleven and sixteen years old. This is me growing through and out of my childhood, as we all must, with all the traumas and adaptations that make us who we are. And with love for those who carried me through and still do. Love is ours. This 8-panel painting is currently on display at the Silk Purse Gallery in West Vancouver during the Harmony Arts Festival .   I'll be doing a YouTube livestream talk with the curator and other fabulous artists this evening, July 31, from 7-8pm. YouTube livestream: https://youtube.com/live/SqwFKAcZ3sg?feature=share

"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 i...