Marcus Day

Flower power: Emily Wierenga displays one of her paintings, "Red Poppy." Her work is on display at the Art Gallery.

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Bright colours from the darkness

In her young life, she has visited dark places where most of us will never go nor can imagine.

At 13 she should have died. Her anorexic body reduced to a 60-pound shell, she lay shivering in hospital, seemingly on her deathbed as nurses hovered under fluorescent lights.

It was then faith touched her heart, love replaced fear as a defining feature, and she began a difficult journey to where she is today – a journalist, author, artist, musician, wife and mother-of-two. She is also a devout Christian hungry for perfection in love, rather than body.

Emily Wierenga’s story is so personal, so emotionally-charged, that it is almost inaccessible to those who have never suffered anorexia nervosa, and yet there are clues in her art, ones that point to that autumn day in 1993 when death appeared closer than life.

“I love to paint in bright colours,” she says. “I’ve been in dark places so maybe I need to see something bright.”

It is an urge that Wierenga believes may also be linked to her artistic temperament.

While her life has changed beyond recognition since adolescence and her Neerlandia home radiates energy and love, she says there are still shadows that pass through her, shadows that will never leave, for melancholy is deeply embedded in every artist.

“The world is a very dark place,” she says. “I think all creative people feel a certain sadness.”

Although Wierenga always harboured a passion to paint, and remembers sketching with a pencil at age eight, it wasn’t until her marriage in 2003 that she unharnessed her talent.

As marriage obscured her self-identity, she felt a need to rediscover herself through painting.

“I asked my husband, Trenton, to build me an easel, and he did,” she says. “I had always wanted to paint and now seemed the right time.”

Wierenga, a pastor’s daughter who comes from a home-schooling heritage, is a self-taught artist, a fact that she does not necessarily see as a drawback.

She is not bound by anyone’s rules, only her own, and can let her imagination take her to the most surprising destinations.

There is a lot of experimentation in her work. Sometimes she will use newspapers, coarse salt and sawdust, sometimes oil, acrylics, paste, gouache and mixed media.

The results are often vivid abstracts, with colours jumping from the canvas in contrasts that can simultaneously shock, inspire, enlighten and disturb.

Occasionally there are echoes of Picasso, one of the artists she most admires.

Check her website www.emilywierenga.com and you may wonder at the range and quality of her work, and how such a talent could have remained in check through adolescence and early adulthood.

There is energy about the way paint has been applied, sometimes with a finger to give a distinctive motion.

“I work very quickly and in spurts,” she says. “I’m mainly inspired by nature.”

This is borne out by her website, where the paintings have such titles as “The earth laughs in flowers,’ ‘Hummingbird,’ ‘Elephant mother and child,’ ‘Trees in Winter,’ ‘Sunflowers in September,’ ‘Rocky Mountains,’ ‘Four Seasons,’ ‘Field of Flowers,’ ‘Tiger,’ ‘Panda Bear’ and ‘Red Poppy.’ Much of her work has been sold.

“I’ve sold quite a few paintings through an online shop or Facebook,” she says. “I’ve also done commissions around the world — England, Australia and the U.S.”

Wierenga is a newcomer to Barrhead’s art scene. She moved to Alberta in July 2010 after living in Ontario, where she taught art to people from broken homes, although most of her focus was on writing, which led to the publication of her first book, Save My Children, in September 2008.

Last year she joined the Barrhead Art Club because she longed to have more community with like-minded people.

As the club’s “artist of the month,” her paintings will be on display at the new gallery, next to Peppers Restaurant.

One day she would love to have her own studio at home.

“It is a big dream of mine,” she says. “I could call it ‘The Emily Studio’ and it could be a place for people to wander in, browse and paint, if they want. That would be pretty cool.”

Wierenga comes across as someone who has discovered a ledge of stability in a chaotic, dangerous world.

With so much happening in her life as she tries to juggle writing, music and painting with being a mother to two-year-old Aiden and baby Kasher, there seems little time to dwell on the early part of her journey.

Yet those dark places are part of who she is, inspiring an outpouring of creativity, whether in words or on canvas.

While Wierenga is happy to share her personal testimony with anyone willing to listen, art and writing are probably the best confidants of the sorrows that have shaped her.