DREAM INTERVIEWS

MAAIKE VERWIJS (Born in Roosendaal, 1986)
Graduated in 2008 from Academy for Art and Design St. Joost.
www.maaikeverwijs.com
Interview by Roger Omar / December 2010.

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-How many times have you moved from house? I have moved four times, I grew up in a small town and when my parents got divorced we moved to another house in the same village. Some time later we moved to a slightly bigger town. When I started artschool it didn’t take me long before I found a room in Breda. At a certain point the room next to mine was vacant and I invited a friend to come and live next to me. One thing led to another and after about a year we moved to a bigger appartment. Now we’re still living there with our two cats, Isis and Baas (dutch for Boss because he rules the house).

-Did you leave in any of these houses a significant history that you´d like to recover? I don’t know if I’d like to recover anything, but I do have good memories of when I moved to live on my own in the room in Breda. I had the most beautiful room in the house (in my opinion of course) High ceiling, large dormer windows that opened to the view of an old church across the road and lots of trees in our street. I loved it although the house was very drafty and it smelled a bit like old people.

-Do you have any strong wish that would be easier to accomplish if you lived in another country or you had another body? Not really, I think I have been very lucky to have been given the chances that I got here in the Netherlands. Being able to study for instance and having some help getting started as a professional illustrator. But that being said, the climate is changing over here and art is something people have very different opinions about and I’m not sure if I’ll be able to continue to work with the same optimism.

-Why? Connecting to some feeling of discontent about society in the general population, some politicians have adopted some different ideas, like the idea that art is a left wing hobby. As a result of this plus the general idea that we need to economise, the already small budget for art is probably going to get even smaller. The most worrying is the idea that art is seen as useless by these people, serving no purpose…

You could say that my wish is to work in a positive environment together with talented people. Maybe at some time I’ll move to another country to try and find such an environment.

-How did you start to draw? For as far as I know I’ve always been drawing, I guess I used to draw a lot of pictures when I was younger and I continued drawing as I got older. I guess it has something to do with a basic need to create. It seemed to be in my nature.

Maaike working in her appartment in Breda.

Crazy nighttime experiment with the Pentax camera.

-Can you describe your drawing style? Clearly defined lines and a colorful palette. Themes that seem to reoccur are fears, danger, storytelling, cinema, dreams and despair. I like to tell a whole story with a single image.

-Does this drawing style talks about your personality? Drawing is a part of my personality, but I don’t know if my personality is expressed very accurate in my drawings. It’s not really a question I am concerned with. Looking at a picture is always very subjective, I might read a totally different message than someone else might. Still I think there must be some connection, but it is a very elusive connection and is hard to define.

-What´s your process for an illustration? The process for every illustration is different and it’s continually changing. But there are some things I think I always do the same, like collecting information and searching for reference images beforehand. I do this for every illustration. It inspires me and gives me ideas to incorporate in the illustration. And very much connected to the profession of illustration (or any other artform maybe) is the moment during the design process when everything seems hopeless and futile. I regularly experience this myself and I don’t know how I manage to overcome this every time somehow.

-Have you imposed yourself some discipline in your professional work or are you more likely to move by casualities? I find it very hard to work on regular times, it’s always some sort of struggle to find a balance between relaxation and work. I have tried working on specific hours but somehow I prefer to work in the evening or the nighttime. So that’s what I’m doing right now. And there’s always something to be done, so I just contemplate on a couple of things; what is most urgent, what would I like to work on, or are there other things beside work that need attention?

-How did you start drawing your own dreams? What is so interesting about them? I started writing down my dreams in highschool. I’ve also drawn some of them during that time. But I rediscovered it at Artschool, basically I found some of my dreams so bizarre, disturbing or amazing I wanted to draw them and I made a series of five drawings.

I think dreams are a strange and intriguing fenomenen. It might sound very cliché to say dreams are so interesting because they offer us a window or a view into the subconscious. But let’s not forget what that means. Somehow through your dreams you are able to learn about yourself, your desires, fears and fantasies, and the same goes for cinema. Both these things are not considered to be part of reality. Film is a representation of reality and dreams somehow take place in another realm of consciousness. But I find they are very important in learning about what it means to be human. In this way dreams offers us a crucial dimension of reality.

-What regular dream-subjects do you already recognize as personal symbols? I don’t really keep track, there are lots of themes that stop by once in a while. For instance I can remember not too long ago I had two dreams, both about my hands. Both dreams involved slicing/cutting open my hands. There are other horrible nightmares I suddenly begin to remember, every now and then I have a terrible nightmare about my cats, finding them dead or being mistreated etc.

-Do you still have a relation with your childhood friends? Do you dream about them? I don’t have many friends from back then. But sometimes I dream about our old house. I can taste the atmosphere and remember the layout by detail.

-What´s your appearance in dreams? Is it the same image that the mirrow reflects? I think it’s pretty much the same, can’t remember having any weird dreams in which I looked differently. Sometimes I’m more like a spectator in my dreams, not present at the scene but just looking on as things unfold.

-What director, music, location would you choose to film your dreams? Directed by David Lynch, music by Popol Vuh, filmed in a nonspecific desert. I can’t imagine what the result would be like.

-What have you learn about yourself from dreams? My dreams tell me something about my fears and that’s a theme I frequently like to draw about.

-Disaster is also a leitmotiv in your drawings. Is it a personal catharsis or is it more related to the idea of collective destiny? What interests me in this notion of disaster is the moment of despair, when everything seems so different from everyday life all of a sudden. You cannot believe it’s happening for real, I haven’t actually experienced a lot of disaster myself (luckily!) But I think you could compare it to seeing someone getting hit by a car for instance. So I think it is connected to the same thing I find so interesting about dreams, thinking about experiencing reality in different ways.

-How does nature influences your work? Human nature is something I am very fascinated by. It’s an infinite source of inspiration and confusion.

-Do you have any special trait that works great with your artwork but not so good with your social life? Sitting inside and watching movies all day works well for doing art and getting inspiration but it’s not beneficial to my social life.

-Have your parents changed your idea of art at any moment? My parents are pretty clueless when it comes to art.

-And what about art-school? Did it influence your way of understanding art? Certainly my time at artschool helped me to develop my personal taste. It also helped me to understand and appreciate more complex or conceptual works of art.

-Did you learn in art-school a way to promote/sell your images? How is this working right now? Yes, this was quite a big topic, but I think it demotivated me because they were focusing on the difficult part, turning it into a problem before we even tried. I think I’m doing quite well right now.  My work is given a lot of attention and appreciation on the internet, I’m illustrating for Ode magazine and for Univers, university newspaper for the University of Tilburg… And I’m working on my own project, a pop-up book that might be published in the future.

-A pop-up book! How did you come up with this idea? It’s always a surprise to open a pop-up book, to see the parts moving. I wanted to know more about the technique, see if I would be able to make some pop-ups of my own. This was the initial idea and along the way I came up with the Aztec theme. I have thought about the theme for a very long time, trying to come up with the perfect story and concept. At a certain point I became interested in Aztec mythology, the human sacrifices and the story of the Spanish conquest.

-Aztec visuals comprehend storytelling and sacred symbolism. Is this related to your book? There isn’t a parallel story, the Aztec mythology is the main thing I wanted to show, and I loved the Aztec art so much I wanted to use it and give my own interpretation. My book is mainly about the different gods and their myths. But I’m also dedicating some pages on Aztec customs. Giving an overview of the Aztec culture in a unique way. So in a way it will be an educational book. But not in the traditional sense I think. I’ll be telling about the myths in detail and making reference to other Mesoamerican cultures. In essence it’s my interpretation of Aztec culture. I also wanted to use different pop-up techniques, so that every page will be different.

-How do you plan each page? I think every page should have something else to offer, so I try to vary the use of pop-up techniques. And of course every page has a different story to tell, I’m planning on making ten pages. The themes or gods I’m certain about are the myth of Huitzilopochtli and Coatlicue, Tezcatlipoca, Tlaloc, Xipe Totec and practise of flaying, the New Fire ritual, the custom of drawing blood, Quetzalcoatl and also the Aztec underworld: Mictlan.

-Do you make a lot of cutouts, tests, photocopies? What is the manual process for this book? It’s somewhat different with each pop-up. First I pick a god or myth or custom I want to draw and think about the various figures and their placement in the pop-up. Then I set about making a working pop-up in which there’s room for everything. When I get the final working version I break it apart and draw the various elements with the exact measurements on a piece of paper. I also indicate the exact place where the elements should be placed on the backing sheet. Then I start sketching on the backing sheet and on the elements the figures and other things that I want to draw. I work on this for a while and make it into a final pen drawing. Often I use waterbased ink for colouring. I might rebuild the pop-up several times during the design process and in the end I always work on the picture with image editing software.

-How much time have you spent working on this book? Does it already have a title? I’ve been working on it for over a year and it still doesn’t have a title.

-Do you have any favorite artists or inspiring visuals? One of my favorite artists is Brecht van den Broucke, he uses some of the same motives like fear and anxiety. His work has a lot of humour in a satirical way.

Since I’ve been working on the pop-up book I’ve also been reading a lot about the Aztecs. And I’m also very interested in other ancient or foreign cultures. It’s very exciting to discover and read about all these amazing things. Like for instance I stumbled upon some texts about the Tibetan book of death, ‘Bardo Thödol’, which has a part dedicaded to the experience of dying and rebirth. And the other day I came across some pictures of shrunken heads, this is a practise native to the Shaur tribe in the Amazone.

-What artists have helped you to grow and stay faithful to your path? There have been several people who I thought to have important or inspiring messages to share. Lately I’ve seen the documentary on Wesley Willis (Wesley Willis’s joyrides), and this inspired me a great deal. He was a New York based artist who sold drawings on the street. He loved to draw the infrastructure of the city; the cars, streets, busses. Later on he started to make music, also to battle the voices in his head because he suffered from chronic schizophrenia. The way he has led his life is something I think is very admirable and thinking about this helps me to stay true to my path, it reminds me it doesn’t always have to be so difficult and that I should enjoy myself while doing art.

© ALL IMAGES BY MAAIKE VERWIJS.