ABOUT:
Eva Douglas is a retired tenured professor from Seneca College of Applied Arts & Technology, who is finally finding her calling as a full time artist. She has painted and worked in mixed media full time since 2016, having already completed a substantial body of work and has been accepted into several juried arts competitions since 2016, including the “Emerging Artists to Watch’ Exhibition, 2018, hosted by the Ontario Society of Artists and won several prizes already, including 1st prize in the multimedia category at the“Overzealous Fine Art Exhibition” in Toronto, in 2020.
However, although late in the game as a painter and digital artist she has been an artist all her life making, teaching and writing about art. Being a graduate of the Fine Arts Program at U of T, Eva then moved early on to win awards for her textile work and being published in several books including Una Abrahamson’s “Crafts Canada: The Useful Arts”. She later became a professional graphic designer, and then moved on to a teaching position in the Design Department in the Fine Art Program at York University, where she taught colour theory and composition. This led to a full tenured professorial position at Seneca College of Applied Arts & Technology (York University Campus) where she became the Coordinator of the Illustration Arts Department – which under Eva’s direction, became formally modified to emerge as the Digital Media Arts Program.
Eva now lives permanently in LaHave, N.S. with her Norwegian husband, having left her daughter, grandkids and son-in-law in Toronto. Through her husband, she’s re-discovering her own Scandinavian roots, having been born in Stockholm, Sweden and coming to Canada as a young girl.
THOUGHTS ABOUT MY WORK:
Endless discussions repeat year after year, analyzing what ART is...its purpose, its process, its relevance to society or the individual. For me, it's a process that demands to be satisfied. There is nothing equivocal about it. It's like eating or sleeping - a necessity. All art is autobiographical. But how it will be received is entirely dependent on its cultural context - political climate, current academic and institutional ideas about relevance and definitions of 'beauty', and finally, our commodification of just about everything. All I can hope to do is trust the process - my own interpretation of how I experience my life as lived as one human being, gifted with life and a will to interpret and make sense of what I experience. Art is forever subjective, no matter how many books are written to define it. Georgia O'Keeffe defined art for herself as "filling a space in a beautiful way". Simply put and to me, more honest than the thousands of pages of definitions and rationalizations that abound on the subject. For me, the act of art making fills me with a sense of calm, of a joy in being able to wander in some inner landscape not knowing where I will arrive until I get there. The final 'artistic outcome' is always a surprise, the end of the journey. But it's the journey that is most fun, the most rewarding, the most necessary to me feeling that I am indeed, experiencing my life...a kind of still point in a world I see as a chaotic maelstrom. It's always interesting to see how other artists define their relationships to their world as they see it. Chagall once said that no-one can compete with the beauty of flowers. Picasso said that art is a lie that makes us realize the truth - a rather provocative and cryptic remark, but interesting to think about. But after reading the recent Max Tegmark's book, Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence, I tend to agree with him when he concludes that "consciousness = subjective experience". This becomes for him the defining argument for whether the most sophisticated of AI constructions can experience a sense of 'self'. Applied to appreciating or making art, I would just say that if a work makes you feel more intensely your self or gain a new shift in perspective in how one views the world, then there has been a raising of 'consciousness'. And I guess that's what I aspire to do.