Creative Confluence: Artist Heidi Daub

Today, I can think of no better person to celebrate creativity and the human spirit than with artist Heidi Daub, and I specifically pronounced it in honoring your father with his more German pronunciation Daub. But you said Heidi Daub is also reasonable. Yes, yes. So welcome. Thank you for being here today. Thank you so much for having me.Yeah, I'm excited. I'm intrigued by the fact that you're not just a visual artist. You work with paintings, but you also work with words. You have a strong movement orientation, to your work. You've really been very multifaceted in your creation of art. So talk to me about your evolution as an artist. Yeah. Well, I grew up in a very athletic family, and I was involved with gymnastics for years and years in dance. At one point we were dancing in our hour, having dance in the studio an hour before our four hour practices in the gym. So dance was, and back in those days I would say there was much more emphasis on the dance aspect, particularly on a couple of the apparatuses. So anyway, I had all that kind of training, which I think has really, really followed me through the years. Sort a mind. I say mind, body, but I often don't like to say it as a separate way. I really feel it's just all one. But that sense that when you're in the midst of something, in the midst of a move, in the midst of a routine, there's a freedom. It's a groove if you hear athletes talk about it that way. And so this was part of my being, and when I got out of the sport, I really dived into, I was in high school and was just very drawn to writing. It was a lot of introspection. I was drawn to the art room and I really decided pretty early on in my senior year, I didn't want to go to a college that was kind of a full liberal arts. I really wanted to focus on hands-on art. I just wanted to sort of do be doing. And so I found a school Montserrat, which at the time it's in Massachusetts at the time was a very small school and wasn't accredited, but it was a four year program and just was a wonderful experience there. I was also, during my high school years, I started playing guitar. I started writing my own songs. When I got to college, I actually met a family, was a roommate of mine who, her family lived down on the wharf and it was a literal, young guys would come off the boats and her mom, it was like this open house and people coming and going, and her dad was pretty well known for, he was with a sea shanty group. And so I got into this whole sort of folk life, folk music world, and the music I'd been listening to earlier too. It was like folk pop music. And this all just had, it was particularly the lyrics of some of the artists I was looking, were listening to. Again, back in those days, it's the albums. So there was the art of the albums, which was I was so drawn to, and then those lyrics and just pouring over the lyrics, pouring in, interspersed with the art. I was playing music with a band at that time and really have continued up to this day. I play traditional fiddle music and we did dances, contra dances for years, and I also write my own songs and things. But the painting has just been, the painting's been constant, the writing's been constant. I started a journal in college, I mean was just, we had to keep a sketchbook. That was something we had to do. And it wasn't just sketches, it evolved into everything book. I just had to take with me wherever I went. And I kept everything in there, grocery lists, and I still do now, although I do definitely sort of have separated my groceries now and have separate lists for that. But I do a lot of timed writing and sketches and just thoughts, titles, lists of art, supplies, possible titles of paintings. So the writing process is very integral to my painting. And often the painting comes out of certain phrase, a certain piece of writing, a concept. The most recent compilation I did is all about, well, it's called in the Time of Turning, but it was all about the concept of confluence and things meeting. I spent a lot of time, my dad was ill, spent a lot of time back in my hometown in Binghamton where the two rivers meet the Shenango and the Susquehanna. And there was something very powerful about being back there, that it was a new awareness of the whole area. And I think probably too, because I was back there sort of caring for my father rather than being cared for by my mom and dad. My daughters had come to visit too. They had just a little babies. So there was new life coming in, life going out, the geographical confluence, and that became a whole series of paintings. I generally work in a series, so yeah, it's all interconnected. Yeah. For me. I do love your compilation, we're calling it of Confluence, Heidi. And there is this sense, as I, even looking at the cover, there is the sense of flow and movement. And as you're describing the rivers that also has that sort of evocative sense of change and ebb and flow. I can see how all of these things would weave themselves together in this compilation very nicely. I think the river, the Susquehanna is a really old river, I think the seventh oldest in the world, and I think about that a lot. I think about mean, my generation, my children and my grandchildren, my parents. But it, it's, it starts to expand for me into just time in general and our concept of time and this movement, movement within time, I guess, or between times. So I feel like I am open to that. I'm open to hearing or being able to sense what I can sense about these different times. One of the things that I was struck by was how deeply you embody your feelings about the world around you. You feel things very deeply, at least in my reading of your pieces and seeing of your pieces. Is that a fair assessment? Yeah, I think so. I think so. I that sometimes to a detriment in a way, because I feel like pulled to so many causes and the awareness of certain things. I think I had written, I wrote about a story when I was little and kind of my first sort of awareness of being in the world or being a part of the world. And it's just something that, it's sort of like my first big memory around three, I think. But I was outside. We had moved to this apartment kind of on an old rural road. It was on a hillside. There was a hill up back, a little creek, trees and woods, thickets. And I just remember I was on my mother's, she had had me in her arms. I was on her hip for whatever reason. And it was just this memory of the light and the awareness of the trees, the air that my being in the world was, I mean, I kind of get goosebumps when I just think about it because it was, again, is a little child. I just didn't think much about it. But as I got older, I felt like, wow, this was a real opening or awakening or something to my being of the world of it. Not necessarily apart from it or just merely observing it. As you speak about that, I also think about one of the pieces, probably more than one, but in particular a piece where you describe being the mother to the now mother, the mother of your, what will become your grandchild. But if you are describing this early sense of embodiment of the world, of being of the world, and now you're welcoming this new being that is now embodying and having their own experience in the world after having passed through this other being that you gave birth to. And again, this sense of coming through and merging with, but then moving past, it's such an interesting idea of how life evolves, What their world will look out, how we can do whatever we can do at this time to, we just can't know. We can't really know what it's all going to be. But I do think that, yeah, mothers and in general, I mean, we have that incredible miracle of being able to have a being grow inside us. It's just miraculous. It's fascinating. Every day it's commonplace, but there's so much, I feel like particularly for artists, I feel like a lot of times mothers are not, haven't been heralded in the way that I think they have the potential of so much intuition and so much knowledge that can help our culture. Sure. Flower in a little different way than pretty male dominated culture that we live in right now. So I'm grateful I can be in my grandchildren's life. I know many people and who knows for how long. I mean, someone may move or they need to go their own way. I care so deeply for them, and everyone's on their own path too. Heidi, how did you end up in Maine? I kind of became aware of Maine when I was going to art school in Beverly, and I met my husband in Gloucester. I had lived in Gloucester while going to Montserrat. I lived with a girlfriend who had a car because I did not have a car. And we commuted and met my husband in a few years and we decided to do a trip to, oh, it was actually, it was when, it was after my second year in college. And at Montserrat at that time. It was a pretty rigid, strong foundation program for the first two years of college with design, graphic design, drawing, painting, kind of all these foundational color study, all this sculpture foundational program. And it was feeling good, but I was also wondering, well, what else might be out there as possibly transferring? And so I actually came to USM I was actually looking at an art school in Halifax too, but I thought, well, let's look at Portland. Portland at that time, that would've been 1980. And it was a young kind of rough and raw sort of city, I think comparatively to Boston and really a lot going on that in retrospect, I think that could have been a really interesting time to come here. Maybe could have bought something downtown Portland or something. Anyway, but there was something, again, like this rawness about the woods. And I had come from Bingham to New York, which was a lot of hardwoods, kind of these, this just felt so heavy with the Evergreen. And then there was the ocean aspect and all these inlets. And we went up to Halifax and I'm trying to think if we went over from Portland. I think we did at the time. There was a ferry and we came back, but later, and we came back and I ended up not coming. I ended up finishing at Montserrat, but we did travel back up to Maine just as a trip after I graduated. We just were still intrigued with Maine. And we came to the Blue Hill Peninsula, which is where I live now. We went over to MDI, there was what, at that time it was called the Pride of Maine Fair, which was at It was a wonderful indigenous celebration, artists and dancers and music both from Maine and Canada. And I think there was something about the light and something about the, I don't know. I think it was just a real draw for us. It just stuck in for both of us. But we didn't move here. We moved up to Southern Vermont and New Hampshire and lived there for a few years and then really just missed the water. I had grown very fond of sort of the wide open expanse of ocean when I lived in Gloucester, being a cape. And even though I grew up inland, but I just felt like we need to, yeah. So we ended up back on the Blue Hill peninsula. Yeah, been here since 1984. Did you raise your family in Blue Hill? Yeah. Yep, I did. We lived in Surrey for a little bit of time. And then, yeah, so we are just right in the same area. We've lived in a couple different houses. We did a lot of, we've, we've built houses, we've renovated, we've torn down, we've cleared woods. We've worked a lot with stone. I was noticing some of the stone work coming of this building. Yeah, granite, predominantly granite. We built a stone house and two of my daughters were born in East Blue Hill at a home birth. And then my third daughter was born in Ellsworth at the hospital. But yeah, they all were born here, grew up in Blue I know that at least one of your daughters is a musician. Yes, yes. They are all musicians. They're all So you've carried forth that legacy. What about your grandchildren or your grandchildren doing anything artistic these days? Well, they are still pretty young. They're six and under, six and three and four and two almost. So they're very playful, creative. They're not doing anything formally. No, but my youngest daughter has two sons. She's got her steel drum set up. She's an amazing steel drum player, as well as my middle daughter, which that is kind of a phenomena. The Blue Hill peninsula was a whole steel band from Carl Chase has passed away now, but he brought that music to the peninsula and it has spread throughout the state. And my oldest daughter, Mesa, started on piano. So she is predominantly a pianist, but plays, she's actually teaching vocals at Bowden now and amazing player, singer. And my middle daughter is an incredible violinist as well as the pan player trumpet player. My husband's a instrumental band teacher. And then of course, we had the whole contra dance rehearsals and all going on in our house all through their growing up. So that doesn't appear to be something that's really happening for the grandkids as far as in those family units. But my middle daughter, there's a piano in the house. We have done a couple little family things like my husband retired from teaching this last June, and we had a band come play, but then our family band played too. And my middle daughter's, two little kids came right up. I mean, they were not told to come up. They just came up one with her fiddle, which she just gets up there and does her thing and the other one on a little ukulele. And she's got a little Banjo too, so they've got the rhythm, that's for sure. Right now. Yeah. There couldn't be a more creative individual than yourself, but also the creativity that you've brought into the world through your family, and also obviously being married to somebody creative. I appreciate your coming in and talking with me today. Thank you. Thank you so much. Yeah, it's been a real pleasure. I really encourage you to learn more about her work. It's quite beautiful, both the words that she has provided into the world as poetry, and also her pieces that are very visually appealing. So it's been a lovely to get to know you, Heidi. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you.