Heidi Veldman was always an inquisitive child. She was someone who put her mind to the things that ignited her childhood senses.
Like the muppet gunslinger on Sesame Street, she strode into the saloon of life wanting a box of crayons and demanding to know Y.
Her curious and creative mind led her on many mental excursions. She was the only child of a single mother, so she developed a special relationship with personal time and personal space. Solitary occupation is where art often develops, and it's where she first whiled away the time with colours on paper, and it soon went well outside the lines of any colouring book.
"When I was a child, I use to write and illustrate 'children's books.' Even when I couldn't write, I'd get my aunt to write down my story and I'd illustrate it," Veldman said. "In high school (she went to Duchess Park secondary school), I painted my first decent painting. It was a CD cover for a female heavy metal band. I was heavily influenced by heavy metal as well as gothic esthetics. A lot of my personal inspiration comes from music videos as well as film and video games. Goth-rock music videos are incredibly atmospheric and I've always loved that. As for actual people, I love (atmospheric film directors) Guillermo Del Toro and Tim Burton. My favorite artists are Megz Majewski and Angelina Wrona. After high school, I went to CNC for New Media Communications & Design. I originally went into it for web design and video editing but fell in love with illustration and desktop publishing. I quickly learned that graphic design is not an easy industry to get work in and went back to school to get my diploma in Marketing & Management. This landed me my current job at the library."
Flip through the below slideshow to view the Alphabet Project art and a link to each artist story:
An inquisitive, creative mind, turned loose in a public library? What a dazzling opportunity for a young artist. She is the in-house graphic designer that whips up the imagery for posters, newsletters, displays, handbills, signs, whatever the library does to get their messages in front of the public eye. It is art with a mission. Not only is it the official storytelling for a public body, but it is also part of the library's ongoing efforts to foster the city's thirst for literacy, research skills, lateral thinking, data collection, understanding of culture, and the movement of ideas.
It is a busy job, an important job, and an all-too-rare job for an artist: that of being a paid full-time artist instead of one creating on the side, in time stolen from socializing or family duties, often late at night or early in the morning, and often as a sacrifice.
What Veldman does have to face, though, is balancing her capacities for the obligatory art done by day at work (she feels immensely grateful for this position and considers library work often her best work, even compared to personal creations) versus the fully free and self-generated art she could do in that personal time at home if she has the creative energy left over.
And she often does. Which is why she appreciated and acted on the encouragement of her former library colleague Neil Godbout, now the editor of The Citizen, about applying for the newspaper's centennial initiative in partnership with the Community Arts Council, this 26-week serial feature called the Alphabet Project.
"As a graphic designer, my work is usually done for others," she said. "I feel like, sometimes, it's not as personal as other mediums. I try to stick to current design trends and work within the confines of client's ideas and concepts. With that being said, I'd like to say I make dreams come true. There is a different sort of satisfaction to doing work for others as opposed to just myself.
"I love the look on someone's face when I finish a job for them and it's everything they visualized. Also, being able to pull of something that someone else visualized is a challenge because most of the time I'm sure they don't even know what they want, initially. This project, for me, has been an exercise in creative freedom."
Veldman was one of the 26 local artists selected from the scores of applicants. She was randomly assigned the letter Y. It was a shape and a phonetic symbol loaded in possibilities. It is sometimes a vowel, sometimes not. It is a dominant letter in the completion of a word, and often changes and defines the tense of given word. It is also a letter many words rely on to begin. It is, symbolically speaking, a very urbane letter, a very constructive letter.
"I wanted to take this opportunity to use techniques that I don't often get to use in my daily life," Veldman said. "As a graphic designer, I don't always have the freedom to do whatever I want with a project. This was my opportunity to express my own personal tastes without worrying about fitting into the confines of someone else's. I knew immediately that I wanted to use a darker palette. I don't get to do that as often as I'd like in my job. I love dark colours but I think many people are afraid to use them and associate them with negative tones. The idea of using just a single letter as a concept is both freeing and challenging. A single letter can be associated with so much that it's hard to encompass all of your thoughts and ideas into one single image. I thought using typography was a natural course of action. It ties together the idea of print media and the versatility of the letter Y. Honestly, the cityscape in the background was a happy accident."
Veldman herself could be described as a prototypical modern urban artist. The computer is a primary art tool in her world. She is often working late into the wee hours on her personal stuff, and she does so listening to everything from K-pop music to metal. Her favourite creative setting is not the kitchen table, as it is for many home artists, it is the games room she and her husband have in their home. Veldman is an avid gamer (Mass Effect and Dragon Age are her favourite franchises, and her go-to television viewing happens with The Walking Dead), she was a hungry eater of the sights and sounds at Northern FanCon and her images reflect the cutting edge styles of cartooning and comics.
Now she's part of the cutting edge of Prince George culture, as one of the baker's double-dozen immortalized in consecutive segments by the city's paper of record on the occasion of their 100th anniversary. She has always been driven to tell stories and represent complex ideas in succinct fashion. Although all the answers to Heidi Veldman are still open to interpretation, with this digital painting positioned near the end of the alphabet, we know the question of Heidi Veldman is a resounding Y.
