"Painting the World" – Conversations with Visual Artists at The Elizabeth Bishop Festival

One of the afternoon events at the Elizabeth Bishop Festival in Great Village, N.S., on 8 August 2015, will be a conversation with four exceptional visual artists: Emma FitzGerald, Carol Laing, Joy Laking and Linda Rae Dornan. This conversation will be moderated by writer and Mount Allison Fine Arts professor Anne Koval. We will profile all of these artists over the next weeks. This post profiles Halifax artist Emma FitzGerald.

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(photo by Scott Munn)

Emma FitzGerald (www.emmafitzgerald.ca) was born in Lesotho, a small mountainous country surrounded by South Africa, to Irish parents, and grew up in Vancouver, B.C. Trained as both an artist and architect she now works as a freelance illustrator and artist in Halifax, N.S.

Her interest in Elizabeth Bishop began when she participated as an artist at White Rabbit (http://whiterabbitarts.ca/), an installation art festival, in nearby Upper Economy, N.S., in August 2013. She biked with her studio chair, a Bass River stool attached to her bike,

(photo by Marcello Roach)

and sat on it as she drew the town of Bass River. This interest was furthered when she stayed in the Elizabeth Bishop House in October 2013, and upon travelling to Brazil in September 2014. She values the connection that Bishop always makes to ‘home’, and the many places home can be found. Emma currently celebrates the notion of ‘home’ in her custom house portraits (https://www.facebook.com/houseportrait).

(Antique shop in Great Village, N.S.)

Emma has been working on a book on neighbourhoods of Halifax for a year and a half, comprised of drawings she did on location in communities from Grand Desert all the way to St. Margaret’s Bay, with anecdotal text. It will be published by Formac Lorimer in the fall of 2015. Before the launch of this book, Emma returns to Brazil for an artist residency in Rio at Largo das Artes (http://largodasarteseng.tumblr.com/).