Gloaming
Emily Verdoorn
Emily Verdoorn; Gloaming; 2022; Mixed media on wood: india ink, pen, pencil, marker, watercolor, colored pencil, charcoal, acrylic, coffee, paper, sheep wool yarn, thread; 22 x 24 inches.
Emily Verdoorn’s Gloaming is part of a collection of over 30 works that seek to pay attention to and grow in affection for particularity. Her conglomeration of marks, images, and materials, which include dried plants, a house at dusk, people, a nest, tree roots, etc, ground the viewer in time, detail, and contemplation, allowing affection for particularity to burgeon within the soul. Verdoorn writes, “In paying attention, I find myself more deeply embedded in and aware of time and place. Time, which can feel arbitrary and mechanical, seems to become charged with meaning as it is tied to seasons, place, environment, scent, texture, observation, memory, and longing.”
Verdoorn’s process often begins by paying attention to the ordinary world through marks and drawings in her sketchbook. As she collects images, marks, and materials they gradually work their way into her mixed media compositions. She likens her unobtrusive attentions to those of poet Seamus Heaney in “Sandstone Keepsake”:
a silhouette not worth bothering about,
out for the evening in scarf and waders,
not about to set times wrong or right,
stooping along, one of the venerators. [1]
Verdoorn embraces the quiet bits of the world as they greet her, quietly taking on “the conditions and the responsibilities of the artist in social turmoil.” [2] Through the conversation of artmaking she honors the tiny blessings that God gives us in our time-bound world by listening and responding with a kind of love and attention.
Additional Information & Resources
Emily Verdoorn
Emily Verdoorn received her BFA at Belhaven University in Jackson, Mississippi. Currently, Emily lives in Wheaton, Illinois and enjoys listening to audiobooks and going on long walks, collecting bits and pieces for her artwork along the way.
[1] Heaney, Seamus. “Sandstone Keepsake.” Station Island: Part 1 (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1985).
[2] From Marchant, Frederick, “A Held Balance,” Harvard Review, No. 10, Homage to Seamus Heaney 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature (Spring, 1996), 116-121.