“Drawing for me is an important extension of language”
Meet Antoinette Esmé Hérivel, Artist in Residence
Antoinette Esmé Hérivel was one of the first artists to start using Imprimo, so we were delighted to get the chance to interview her about her work for this month’s Artist in Residence feature. She talks about making art as a lifelong form of play, the cook who encouraged her drawing as a child, and telling stories through memory, observation and imagination. She talks about how “engaging with making stuff is as vital … as eating and sleeping,” and how her dual interests of working with flora in the present and memories of her past come together in her upcoming work.
You can see Antoinette’s recently completed series, “The Green Front Door”, 31 drawings on paper inspired by her childhood in post-war England, at the Gabriola Public Library. The work is on show until the end of August.
Imprimo: Hi Antoinette,
You’re answering our Artist in Residence interview from your home/studio on Gabriola Island, BC. What’s the view from your window?
Antoinette Esmé Hérivel: My house and studio are situated on a slope. From my window I see my small, fenced flower garden surrounded by forest terrain which slopes toward the ocean straight between Gabriola Island and the city of Nanaimo. Beyond that are the snow-capped mountains in mid-Vancouver Island. I regularly see a range of wildlife from my window: deer, racoons, eagles, ravens and a variety of songbirds.
I: You have written that as a child, drawing was a form of playing that thoroughly immersed and occupied you. After decades as a professional artist, art teacher, art mentor, how does the adult you view drawing now? Is it still play?
AEH: Very much so, especially since I moved here ten years ago from Saskatchewan having retired from professional activities, including teaching. I decided to pull back and take time to focus on my work, rediscover myself as to what I want to do in the last part of my life. Play for me is working out how to express several ideas or thoughts on the same piece of paper or canvas through drawing and painting. Sometimes I play about with mixed media paper collages before beginning new painting or drawing series. I find the process immensely satisfying. It’s probably similar to composing music.
I: Did you have an art teacher as a child that particularly encouraged you?
AEH: We were encouraged to be creative in elementary school. I attended a very strict boarding high school for seven years and the teacher didn’t like me experimenting with colour mixing when not instructed. I found a book on cubism and asked for paper to see if I could work out what Picasso had done. I was refused but found an ally in the cook who gave me used sugar and flour bags to draw on. My best teacher was at teacher’s college in London. She was an itinerant from the Slade art school and under her guidance I discovered painting.
I: Can you talk about art as memoir? We’re thinking in particular about your work which draws heavily on your post-war childhood experiences in the UK.
AEH: Drawing for me is an important extension of language. My need to engage in memoir is tied up with identity and also legacy which explanation would take up more than I can talk about here. I have taken tiny flashes of recollection, based them around history and expanded them to exploit as drawings and paintings, sometimes adding text as in The Green Front Door. Science tells us that memory is not static, changing with retelling. I like that idea because it frees me up to add and invent details.
I: What source material informs these autobiographical works? Did you keep journals as a child? Do you revisit the locations of your memories, or have photographs?
AEH: I have a few photos of that time, but a couple of studio portraits school photos and newspaper cuttings. People didn’t take photos the way we do now. I used photo archives and Google Earth. The houses I lived in are still there. I followed a blog about the restoration of the old canal system in Swindon (England) because it was part of a drawing I did. I went back once to Alton, the town in Hampshire which inspires the Ackender Road series. I love the countryside of the southern English counties and am interested in researching history generally.
I: Your paintings of botanicals indigenous to the Pacific Northwest Coast of North America and your work that features forests or gardens feel like the perfect balance to your more obviously autobiographical work. Where the latter recalls events long past in another country, the former captures something local and — though delicate — alive in the moment you capture it. How do these two interests work together for you?
AEH: I am a storyteller working through observation, memory and imagination and that is always in my mind. Presently I live surrounded by a fast-changing fragile environment that begs not to be ignored. I am equally engaged in what is current and that made me want to document the forest. I began the botanical drawings as a pandemic project which dovetailed the forest paintings. I have been working simultaneously with dual interests since I began the memoir pieces, keeping them private until recently. I am planning a new series. It may be taking on a combined direction.
I: Where do you find the plants you paint? Are you a gardener? A hiker?
AEH: All the plants were found in my wild garden or in the ditches close by and most are native to the Pacific North West coast used for hundreds of years by Indigenous people. Doing this project was a way to try to learn a little about and honour the unceded territory I live on. I have always been a gardener and I love hiking. This year I have had to put these activities on hold because of recovering from two surgeries.
I: Past Artist in Residence Grant McConnell asks: Why do you keep making this stuff?
AEH: Grant, I wish I knew! I know that engaging with making stuff is as vital to me as eating and sleeping! Recently I haven’t been able to work in my studio for a fairly long chunk of time due to health reasons. The absence made me sad and realize that I need to make art for my mental wellbeing, whether it is appreciated and speaks to others, or just to myself.
I: OK, Quick-fire round:
What artist(s), living or dead, would you most like to meet for coffee?
AEH: Caravaggio, Rembrandt, Goya, Kathe Kollowitch, Paula Rego, Edward Burtynsky, Zachari Logan.
I: Is there an unlikely skill you’ve acquired in service of your art?
AEH: Patience.
I: Can you remember the first piece you exhibited publicly?
AEH: United Nations Children’s exhibition 1948, Swindon Town Hall.
I: What’s the last gallery you visited?
AEH: Nanaimo Art Gallery about two weeks ago.
FIND Antoinette Esmé Hérivel on Imprimo
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IN CASE YOU MISSED IT …
Huge congratulations to our friends at Prairie Art, a new magazine dedicated to writing by and about Canadian art and artists. In the words of publisher Angela Bugera Matheson of the Bugera Matheson Gallery in Edmonton, “This online periodical exists to tell the story of the arts in Western Canada, by those who lived it.” We are honoured to be included in the pages of its inaugural issue, which was published in July. You can read Prairie Art online now at prairieart.ca.
