Nordic Heritage Museum Nordic American Voices Interview of Eva Isaksen on January 28, 2012 at Seattle, Washington Interviewed By
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
Nordic Heritage Museum Nordic American Voices Interview of Eva Isaksen On January 28, 2012 At Seattle, Washington Interviewed by Caitlin Cotter and Lise Orville Caitlin Cotter : [0:00] Interview for the Nordic American Voices Oral History Project, today is January 28, 2012 and I will be interviewing Eva Isaksen. We are at the Nordic Heritage Museum in Ballard, Washington. My name is Caitlin Cotter, and I am here with Lise Orville. Can you say your name? Eva Isaksen : [0:30] Eva Isaksen. Caitlin : [0:32] OK. Eva : [0:33] Thank you. Caitlin : [0:34] Thank you, welcome. Lisa Orville : [0:35] Thank you, we're very happy to be able to interview you. I wondered if we could start with your childhood in north Norway? Eva : [0:50] I was born in Bodø in Northern Norway. It's a little bit north of the Arctic Circle. At the time, it was probably a city around 15,000 people. It's a city that was totally bombed during the Second World War. It's a new city. It was rebuilt after the war. Just a couple of the buildings survived. Most everything was leveled. [1:28] I was born in 1955. My father, [inaudible 00:01:35] , he came from Tromsø in further north. My mother's home was at Finnsnes, which is also further north of Norway. All my family is from Northern Norway. [1:54] I grew up in Bodø. We lived in a couple of kilometers outside the city. It was easy to walk there, a couple of kilometers away. In the place called [inaudible 00:02:14] , which was ideal for a place to grow up. It's right where the ocean. [2:23] Bodø is surrounded with very, very beautiful landscape, the mountains, and the water. Bodø is on the peninsula. Its water surrounding the peninsula and beautiful mountains in all directions. You can actually see out to [foriegn language] on a clear day. You can see [foreign language] islands in the distance. [2:51] My childhood was a very good one. Like most families, somewhat, I was born ten years after the war ended. I guess Norway was rebuilding. We didn't have much money or wealth when I grew up. But, we certainly didn't lack anything. In the area where we lived was very few houses at the time and a lot of nice areas outside to play in. Nordic American Voices Page 1 of 16 [3:38] As kids, we spent lots and lots of time outside. It was not common, like now, that we played inside with your friends in houses. You were asked to go out. When dinner was done, my dad would come outside the house and just have this whistle. He would whistle and I knew that was the signal to come home. [4:06] I had several friends. There were lots of kids there. Several good friends. Every summer, we would visit my aunts and uncles and grandparents in Finnsnes and in Tromsø, northern [inaudible 00:04:25] . My grandparent, on my mother side, were at Finnsnes. I was their oldest grandchild, so I spent a lot of summer with them. Really great memories from that. [4:41] My grandfather was a very interesting man. He collected everything. He had huge collections of books. He also had a book store. Stamps. Coins. Cactuses. He had nothing but cactuses in his house. North of the Arctic circle, he was fond of animal. He had little tortoises. He had exotic birds. I don't know where he got them all from but he had them. Dogs. Aquariums. He was an interesting man to be around. [5:30] The book store was really interesting to me. Being able to look through the books and I developed very early, I loved reading. That stayed with me always. I was always very fond of drawing and art in general. I was good at drawing. I would spend many, many hours just making up stories in my head and drawing them. [6:11] I was lucky, my best friend at the time, her father was a painter. His name is Oscar Boutigoy. He just passed away this December. He was 88 or 89. He was, at the time, the only real artist in Bodø. I was so impressed by him getting into his studio to work while all the other dads put on their suits and went to the office or wherever they worked. [laughs] . [7:02] He was a very early big influence on me as an artist. Of course, he didn't want us kids running around in his studio when he was working. Sometimes, he would tell us to go down to the ocean and draw the mountains and not be back for at least two hours. We would go down there and work and come back and he would take a look at it and critique it. [7:36] And he became a very famous painter in Norway. Eventually, through the years, he and his son Harland who also is a good friend of mine, founded a historical museum on their property where they collected lots of things from northern Norway, from households, from tools, from boats, showing them the history of northern Norway. [8:16] They also, eventually, opened a gallery. I was invited to have an exhibition there in 2000. It was really nice to come back there and actually show my work in a very beautiful gallery that was ran by Oscar who had such an influence on me when I was little. [8:46] I went to school in Bodø, all through the first years and middle school and high school. I traveled a lot, like teenagers and kids do in Norway, work for a few weeks and then take off in Europe. I had very many interesting trips in Europe. I have never visited the United States. It was so far away, I wasn't even thinking about that as a possibility or interest. Nordic American Voices Page 2 of 16 [9:44] In 1976, a friend of mine contacted me and her name is Ginette Boutigoy. She is the niece of the painter. She had married an American she'd met hitchhiking in Europe and settled with him on a farm in South Dakota. She's a weaver, and I have some background in weaving. [10:12] After going through the years of schooling in Bodø, I worked there in Oslo at a weaving school, and I also had a couple of other years of schooling in Norway, I went to an arts and crafts school in Narvik for one year, and I also went to what we call a [foreign speaking] after [foreign speaking] which is like high school, and this was in Denmark. [10:50] It's very popular for Norwegian kids to take that year [foreign speaking] school. It's a year where you can pick the school that has the subjects that interest you, so I picked one that had art and theater and some psychology and philosophy, and spent a year at that school together with maybe 40 other students, so we lived there for a year. [11:16] And that's where I also had my second big inspirational person as an artist, and Karl Andriessen was his name, he was the painting instructor and also ran this school in Denmark. And he took my work very seriously, he was very, very encouraging, so him and Oscar Boutigoy was really very instrumental for me in those days. [11:50] So my friend Ginette that got married and settled on the farm in South Dakota, she came back one summer to Norway and called me up and wondered if I would come over for a year. She had two small children and I could help her take care of the children, and then I could also help her weave because she had this big weaving studio in South Dakota, and she had lots of sheep, and she would plant dye and spin and weave from that yarn she made. [12:26] And I had totally other plans, but decided that's an opportunity. So in 1977, I went to South Dakota, and actually I left the 7th of the 7th in 1977, which is kind of funny... And I ended up on her farm outside Vermillion in South Dakota, and lived with her and her husband and her two kids for a full year. [13:02] It was a very different place to land. From coming from northern Norway or Norway in general, the nature with big mountains, lots of water and ocean, and coming to South Dakota where it was just flat in all directions as long as you can see and extremely hot in the summer and extremely cold in the winter. [13:33] I think the first two weeks I was there it was never under 100 degrees and 100 percent humidity, and I thought, "Oh my gosh, what have I done." [13:46] [laughter] [13:48] But Ginette is a fabulous person. She actually used to babysit me when I was a little girl when I lived in Norway. We became really good friends, and it was fun to be there. I also took classes at the University of South Dakota, in art classes there. During that time I also meant Jeff Svenson, who's now my husband, and made many other friends. [14:25] It was exciting to be so far away from home because you're really on your own and you can kind of create your own life in a way.