BY: DUSTIN BATTY
Andrea Fredeen, a painter from Prince George, British Columbia, completed an innovative project last year that challenged her skill and stretched her creative boundaries. During an interview, I asked her to describe her project. “I was looking at whether using two different narrative forms to look at that same story would give you a more enhanced or comprehensive meaning of what that story is actually about,” she told me. “I was actually trying to write a fictional story—a story that was based on life experience, but there’s fiction mixed in it—and then trying to tell that same story in one visual image.”
She said she chose the stories because they were memories that her mind kept going back to. “So, you have these memories, these stories that float around in your head, and as you get older you’ll find that there’s some that always come back, right? So, I picked these stories that seemed to be perseverating in my brain. So there are some family things in them, and some of them were very, very difficult to write. It was very challenging. But ‘The Artist Project,’ though, it was still a fun relief for me because it explored those experiences of mine. Some experiences as a child, as an adult, you know, these different parts of my life. I think I wrote one about running, I wrote some about my childhood, my experience as an artist, and experiences just living in the neighbourhood.”
This experimental self-exploration was the major project that she had chosen to undergo as a requirement for completing her Master of Arts in English with a Creative Thesis at the University of Northern British Columbia. As such, her creative project had to be accompanied by a theoretical section that explained her approach to the project and the reasons behind her decisions. Far from tedious, Fredeen found the experience very positive. “I really enjoyed writing the theory part. It was interesting finding out that all this stuff that I’d been kind of thinking, other people had been kind of thinking,” she told me.
For example, one theorist she mentioned was Paul John Eakin, who analyzes the process of autobiography. “Here’s this guy who’s studying autobiography and talking about how it’s impossible to write historically accurate autobiography. It’s not possible. You have to have fiction in there,” she told me. “And for me, that was amazing because, oh my God, there’s like this sense of freedom that…this is my story, you know, these are my experiences. And they might not be the truth for somebody else, but I’m telling my story the best way I can, and that’s okay.”
Autobiography is grounded in truth, but depends strongly on fiction. “Fiction is a huge, huge component,” she said, “because it allows the person to do some mask-wearing, some role-playing, introducing purely fictional characters or situations to get a close-up reading of self and what is actually happening at that time.”
Another theorist, Slavoj Žižek, explains the benefits of using multiple forms of media to tell a single story. According to Žižek, “looking at these different perspectives actually enhances an understanding of that subject,” Fredeen told me. “So it’s actually really important to do, to be able to look at things in different ways, and approach it from different angles. Looking at a life event through fiction—storytelling, creative writing, and visual art—is a really good way to explore that event.”
Despite these benefits, artists rarely practice this technique. Fredeen told me that during her research, she only found one other example of an artist combining visual art with creative writing in an autobiographical way. Art Spiegelman’s Maus is a graphic novel that depicts Spiegelman’s relationship with his father. “He did all of the artwork, he wrote his own story, based on his life experience,” Fredeen told me. “And that was pretty much the only one I could find. I mean, I’m sure there must be others out there.”
During our interview, she explained why so few artists combine visual art and creative writing. “There’s clearly a reason why, you know, artists and writers don’t combine the two things more often. Because it’s actually really challenging to switch gears like that, and it’s exhausting, and it’s really hard to do.” And after completing the project, she found that she was creatively exhausted. “I couldn’t write anything, and I couldn’t paint. I just shut right down. It was weird.”
Despite this difficulty, though, she deems this experience a positive one. She described one experience she had while working on the project: “There was one story—‘The Artist Project’—that I wrote about, and I was combining all my experiences that I had at different artist retreats and workshops and things. You meet a lot of wacky people, yeah, there’s a lot of strange things that happen. I was trying to put some of those stories together, and it started out as something funny, or I thought was, and I was writing it, and it was coming along okay, but it just didn’t seem right somehow. I was getting frustrated with the story, so I put the story away and started working on the painting. I went through different versions of the painting and when I finally finished the one painting, all of a sudden, it was this weird ‘Aha!’ moment, it was just, ‘Oh my God, I’m actually writing about grief, and loss, and … but looking at it through humour,’ and I didn’t really get that through the story. And I don’t know if anybody else would get that, looking at the image and, you know, the story itself. But for me, I had a much better understanding of what emotions were going through me as I was trying to write this story. And so, having that understanding, I was able to come to end the story in a way that, for me, was satisfying. It seemed to end better.”
She says the experience has made her a better painter. “I’m no longer just looking at finding something cool to represent, I’m looking at the story behind it, and I’m realizing everything is telling a story,” she told me. “So, what is it about this that I decided I want to paint this? There’s got to be some movement in there, there’s got to be. It can’t just be a pretty flower, otherwise you’re going to bore people to tears. There’s got to be something else. So I’m looking for stories now, in subjects I’m choosing to paint, which is a different approach.”
She told me she would like to try combining visual art and creative writing again sometime, though it will be a while before she makes another attempt. “I don’t know how many more times I’m going to try to actually fuse those two forms together again. I think it’s worthwhile, and I would like to try it again, but I can see why there isn’t a lot of it out there.”
