Art as Therapy and Benign Vengeance: Elizabeth Haidle, Catapult Artist for January

As part of our Catapult Artist program, Nicole Caputo, Catapult’s art director, sits with December’s #CatapultArtist for a conversation on art, creativity, and the artist’s life.

I have been following Elizabeth’s work for many years and was so excited to hear about her enthusiasm for our Catapult Artist program. Her whimsical and quirky art grounded by earthy, rich palettes and often accompanied by humorous hand-lettered captions seemed the perfect way to start off our new year.

She created eight pieces of art for the magazine, their topics ranging from mental health to queen bees, from striking pitch pines to alien cheerleaders. Every time we shared a new essay or story with her, beautiful written concepts that were tricky to visualize on a canvas, Elizabeth’s art—even her earliest concept sketches!—made all of us in the office sigh with admiration and gratitude. Her works lit up Catapult this month and we hope they will also illuminate your reading experience.

Elizabeth creates her art in Portland, Oregon, where she also plays the musical saw. For more of her work, follow her on Drip and on Instagram @ehaidle.

Nicole Caputo: We would love to hear a bit about your process and how you begin.

Oooh, process. It’s different every time for me, possibly because I rebel against even my own guidelines regularly. But I know for sure my initial ideas are crap—definitely each project starts with a whole slew of iterations. I make myself draw one idea over and over again, then paint it quickly, then do it in another color. Sleep on it. Wake up and do more variations of each version. Eventually, something is gonna nail it.

I did discover, a little later in life, that the more I hone my personal practice and spend time on themes that interest me, the more there’s an overlap—invariably, something I’ve already been thinking about seeps into a work project. Usually, on a paid project, I land on the solution that I like much sooner when I’ve been juggling more experimental things on the side.

What is the medium you use most and why?

Liquid saturated watercolors (usually Noodler’s Ink) and hand-mixed pan watercolors (by Case For Making). The liquid is quick to make shapes with. I find I can work as fast as I’m thinking. But the dried pigments with sediment in them have a velvety texture and dry more slowly, so those are ideal for blending and layering details. As to the why, I like that the results are a blend between what I see in my mind that I wish to recreate, mixed with a bit of surprise—as accidental textures occur on the page whenever the watery pools of color dry differently, each time.

Realistically, Photoshop has been a key tool, not just for clean up, but sometimes to create some of the final details or alter colors, or both. It speeds things up. Maybe I’d prefer to do more work by analog means, yet I’ve needed to have overlapping gigs, and working digitally can make more work possible in a shorter time frame. Flexibility is key!

What subjects or projects excited you most in your professional and personal work?

Non-fiction, idea-based stuff. Thought-provoking fiction that gets our imaginations harnessed in the direction of re-envisioning the future. Art-as-therapy. For myself, in a personal practice, and also in art educations settings—expressing one’s inner self in any creative means is an inherently powerful, healing, and expansive process. I also like making customized postcards and letters and sticking them in the mail. I’ve always enjoyed using the postal service as a magical portal for transporting art objects across distances. I’m angry there’s so much junk mail and burdensome stuff in our mailboxes, so this is my ongoing path of benign vengeance.

I, Parrot is such a favorite amongst many of us here at Catapult. Can you tell us a bit about the graphic novel and how you and Deb Olin Unferth worked together?

How we worked together, whether in person or long-distance (both, over the course of a year): chaotically, organically, hysterically, and somehow, it went surprisingly well! It involved a good deal of trust that each of us placed in the other, considering neither of us had every collaboratively produced a long-form comic narrative before. We both learned as the process went along. We both got rather involved in each other’s lives, exchanged a lot of personal stories, and none of that was required, but it made the project more fun.

Certainly, there were setbacks and do-overs and rounds of last-minute editing, none of which was fun, but was necessary. We talked about doing some sequel project, maybe involving something we experienced together, tried to do, and then documented. We were going to call it ’Road Trip to Iceland.’ I suppose it still may happen! Also, I would like to see Iceland.

You have a great command of typography and lettering. Do you have any formal type training, or are you self-taught?

Well, thank you. All that I can say is that whatever has resulted was born of necessity—years of frustration with traditional fonts and not-quite-right hand-lettered stuff. It was gratifying to just make my own finally. I just finished researching Wanda Gag (of Millions of Cats) for a book I’m working on, and she had the same issue. Instead of using machine type, she hired her brother to hand-letter her early books. I felt a kinship with her immediately!

What are your suggestions for artists looking to become illustrators?

Develop a side skill that you can pair with it, because illustration alone doesn’t often cut it today. Like journalism and comics, or book illustration and layout design, writing and illustrating, teaching and illustrating. Maintain a personal practice and bring that which is personal into any project that you possibly can. If you aim to just make a nice-looking image, someone could have easily used a stock image for that; there would be no need for commissioning a custom one.

Can you bring us through a typical work day for you? How do you like living as an artist? What are the positives and drawbacks?

Oh boy. No such thing as typical, though I’ve experimented with keeping a morning routine for at least the first two hours. If I go straight to my painting table in the morning and do thirty minutes of painting on a personal project or exploration, like #100dayproject type stuff (I’m currently into Fantastical Hairdos and Patron Saints of odd stuff), those typically are my favorite and most productive days. Of course, a lot of hours are filled with regular business stuff like invoicing, reminders about invoices, warnings about overdue invoices, accounting, and project proposals.

Working hard on self-promo and project application type stuff is the hardest for me—I call it ’working to get the work’, and it can be rather demoralizing if nothing is coming of it. I absolutely love working hard when there’s a contract, a deadline, and clarity about what’s in front of me. So maybe I won’t be self-employed all my life, but for now, it has largely supported the flexible way I wish to parent. I’ve wrapped my business model around my kiddo and his schedule and changing needs. That has been a decision I’ve never regretted.

You mentioned how your personal work often fuels your professional work. I am curious also how you refill your creative tanks outside of your work?

Fave ways to refill creative tanks:

1. Reading. I have piles of books everywhere. I even take trips with just my books; I’ll just sit in a bed and read without distraction

2. Lying very still. It’s my form of meditation: naps in a hammock or on my paddleboard, and doing yoga, but only the corpse pose.

3. And playing a lot of Surrealist games like Hypothetical Dictionary and Exquisite Corpse. (Plus just reading more about Surrealism in general.)

We know you are busy working in a variety of projects. Can you let us know what you are currently excited about?

Oh, glad you asked! The Pipers is my collaborative sci-fi graphic novel with my younger brother. My older brother composed music for the trailer on our Kickstarter campaign. (We are still taking orders through an Indiegogo site while doing post-production for the month of February . . . can I suggest a link or to follow @ehaidle to find out the details?) It’s an adaptation of a Philip K. Dick short story from the 1950s, with a message we thought was currently poignant for the time we are living in today.

I have two books coming out in the fall, a picture book by Alice B. McGinty, that I illustrated, called The Girl Who Named Pluto: The Story of Venetia Burney. Also, I have a longer nonfiction book that I wrote myself, Before They Were Authors: Famous Writers as Kids. There will be a sequel in a year and a half, a version about famous illustrators as kids.

Working with Illustoria magazine has been my most favorite project. I’ve been able to channel so many of my interests and experiences into this one endeavor: getting to art direct, edit, contribute to, and help produce this publication about connecting kids with creative project ideas, while offering an array of stories, comics, and interviews to expose them to a wider world of possibility.

I have a couple proposals out in the world—a Tarot deck, a writing and drawing activity book involving Surrealist games, and a history of ornithology (another long-form comic). We’ll see if anything happens in the next year or two with those ideas! Meantime, I’m drawing lots of impossible hairdos on Instagram to amuse myself.

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