ARTISTS AMONG US
/DOROTHY WOODEND
by Ashima Shukla
(click images to enlarge)
“I have always wanted to be someone like you,” was the first thing I told Dorothy Woodend, West End artist and culture editor for The Tyee.
It was true! Dorothy is an artist in every sense of the word, having produced contemporary dance and new music concerts, run a small press, programmed film festivals, written for papers across the US and Canada, and sold her art, most recently at the West End Commuity Centre’s Art in the City exhibition and sale. Despite winning several awards for her writing, she has admitted she never planned to be a writer.
So when I met her at Perfecto Café, I wanted to uncover the mystery. “I want to understand you,” I told her, and she laughed. “If you do, maybe you can tell me!”
We soon fell into an easy conversation, and 45 minutes turned into an hour thirty. And still, vibrant, funny, and a little eccentric, Dorothy was full of stories.
ART WAS HER NORTH STAR
Dorothy was born with a twin sister on their mother’s birthday. “So that means my brother gets to call us the three-headed monster,” she tells me.
Growing up on her grandparents’ farm on the East Shore of Kootenay Lake, the arts were her north star, her path out of rural poverty. Music and literature filled her childhood days, and since her mother was what she calls, “a writer’s writer” (having written 27 books), Dorothy was more drawn to be the art kid. When everyone in her fourth grade class was completely obsessed with Star Wars, she was the one drawing Han Solo and Darth Vader for her classmates.
But the idea was always to get out. So, when she turned 17, she moved to Vancouver with her sister. She first studied English at SFU, then film animation at Emily Carr, which was, “a million times harder,” she told me. Her studio-based program meant she was working 12-hour days, only to camp under her desk at night for a few hours of sleep before resuming. And the student loans didn’t help either.
On a whim, she started an arts management company with a friend, doing contemporary dance and opera, which also required a lot of time and attention. “Because in event production, everything that can go wrong will go wrong!”
Meanwhile, life happened, and she became pregnant with her son. Her first day back to work after maternity leave, two planes crashed into the World Trade Centre and the world would never be the same.
For Dorothy, it was like an omen. She quit her job and began freelancing, writing for the Vancouver Sun and magazines. Working from home with a newborn, “There were days where I'd be like, ‘I have to read this article. Please stop screaming at me!’" she told me.
In 2003, life shifted again, as her editor David Beers left the Vancouver Sun and founded a new online magazine. “So, I think my first article for The Tyee as their film critic was in 2004,” she recalled. Writing one review a week for Beers, Dorothy also spent these years working at the Vancouver International Film Festival and the DOXA Documentary Film Festival.
In those years, work had taken over and she barely painted. “There was simply no time,” because after working the whole day, she would come home to watch the next set of films to review. When Mother’s Day would fall on the last day of the DOXA festival, and her son would buy her comically sarcastic cards like, "I hope you enjoy saving the world with your documentary films!"
ALWAYS SEARCHING FOR PATTERNS
What became apparent about Dorothy through our conversation was her brilliant ability to draw connections between seemingly disparate things. We went into digressions, first on her review of I Love Boosters, and our love for fashion, then about the way women protesting FIFA resulted in the women’s soccer team in 1971 playing at the biggest stadium, Estadio Azteca in Mexico City.
We talked about her interview with Jane Goodall, and the foolish hubris of humans when they claim to be superior to other animals. We dove into the failures of the left, and feminist history rewriting all we know. She recommended I read Heather Cox Richardson’s Letters from an American, and catch the current exhibition Future Geographies: Art in the Century of Climate Change at the Vancouver Art Gallery.
Across all these themes, it became obvious that for Dorothy, art “is this engine of empathy and beauty,” that also “feels slightly dangerous sometimes because it gets past all your defenses and into the heart of you.
“And when you’re oversaturated with all the horror, with all the atrocities, and want to numb yourself because you can’t take it anymore - what art does is create this weird cohesion.” Art helps make sense of the absurdity of human existence.
PICKING UP THE BRUSHES AGAIN
It was only when Covid-19 brought the world to a standstill that Dorothy started painting again. Her son, by then studying at McGill, was home for a few months, too. “We'd watch movies and make dinner and just hang out,” she smiled fondly. And in the stillness, the drive to paint reawakened.
“That's why, at the end of the writing day, I just step away from the computer. And that is when the visual world can be such a place of respite. The mental chatter just dies away, and often, you don’t even notice time passing,” she explained.
“You start doing something and then it’s like six hours later, you know?” It is like a trance, for a brain driven by the verbal to let the words fall away. To let image convey the stories.
“When you're making something, you're inside of it in a way that you're not when working digitally,” she continued. “So when I draw, I don't want to use a tablet, you know? You need the tactile, physical thing. You need the imperfection of the human hand.”
Today, her creative practice looks like doing something small every day, even if only for one hour after work. “Sometimes you sit down and you don't really have any sort of preconceived notion about what it is you're going to do. And then you surprise yourself!”
This playfulness also takes the form of doing small studies, say, painting a panther in a jungle. And soon, as animals emerge on small canvases, Dorothy begins to wonder, “what is the relationship between these things?” The pattern-making begins again.
THE EPIC DRAMA OF THE ANIMAL KINGDOM
“But why animals?” I ask her. “Well, because they always have personality and character. There are a lot of stories embedded in that!
“When I was little, there was a writer named Gerald Durrell who grew up on the island of Corfu and wrote this whole series of books, because he became like… a naturalist.
“But when he was a little kid, he was growing up with his insane, eccentric English family. And he just talked about not only his family, but animals in particular, like, bugs, insects, fish, whatever. And I just remember wanting to be him, like wanting to do exactly what he was doing.”
So, she did. At her grandparents’ farm, she tells me, “We had a pond right below our house.” And little Dorothy would spend hours observing it. “It's like an epic drama. There are villains and there's violence and you're crouched to the edge of this pond, just watching everything unfold.”
I see another thread emerging there, something I hear from every artist I have interviewed so far. This skill of mindfully observing nature and finding in it an unending source of awe was something they all shared.
“The other thing that I think drawing has taught me is just how unbelievably detailed the world is. Like if you look at a lobster and you're trying to figure out all the connected stuff and it's so complicated. But it's also just insanely beautiful. You come to have this weird appreciation and awe. And it starts to sort of filter into how you view the world, you know?” Like the street you walk down turns into a medley of light and shadows, of tones and colours.
“You could try for a million years and you'd never be able to fully capture that.
And it's everywhere you look!”
COMMUNING WITH THE PAST
When I ask Dorothy about the way AI is infiltrating the creative professions, she tells me about being in a British Museum, looking at Da Vinci’s charcoal study, The Virgin of the Rocks.
“It’s kind of raggedy because it's so old. But you can see what he was doing. With his arm, playing in the room. And as you're looking at it, you realize, he is a real dude,” she tells me.
“You understand it because you've done it. It gives you this really intense connection to something that's hundreds of years old. And it's still alive. It's still alive because somebody made it.” She continued.
“But you get the sense that humans have been doing this since forever. Trying to translate this thing you see in the world into art. I think that’s fundamental. Humans are art makers. Like you're part of this continuum that started in the caves in Lascaux and is still going!”
That is another reason Dorothy is drawn to paint. “You make it, but you don't know what's going to happen to it. And then it goes off to have its life,” she explains, telling me of the time one of the chickens she made ended up in the south of France. “I was completely taken by surprise by that.”
ADVICE FOR THE CREATIVES
“Hope is a discipline,” Dorothy quoted the abolitionist Mariame Kaba, when I ask her how she gets through the hard days as a creative.
“There was one day where I was just in such a dark frame of mind. And I was going to take the day off because I just thought I wasn’t going to do anything. And I thought, ‘Oh my gosh, am I supposed to go to this opening of this gallery?’ And of course then I went, and it completely reversed everything. That's what something really great can do… to return you to yourself, right?”
So for the creatives looking for motivation to get started, Dorothy says, “Just do stuff! Because there's just joy in messing about, right? Like trying stupid stuff because you just want to see what happens. I think that's what keeps you alive.”
You can find Dorothy’s art on her Facebook and Instagram.
