Today I’m chatting with Angelique Van Grootel, a visual artist, coach and teacher living in a tiny monumental farmhouse in the village of Oirschot in the south of the Netherlands.
As an HSP (highly sensitive person), Angelique took a roundabout journey to her little farmhouse, leaving the city after a severe period of burnout in 2013 awakened her to her own creativity as a source of healing.
Nowadays she works in her studio as a visual artist, artistic teacher and artistic dynamic coach, which also serves as her practice where her clients visit her for therapeutic sessions, courses and workshops.
Enjoy our ramble through the fairytale Thumbelina, relationship with body, and with creativity.
Things we chatted about in this episode:
- the fairytale Thumbelina
- being true to yourself rather than falsely loyal to someone/thing else
- being an exchange student in Japan (Janelle) and learning a second language
- speaking Dutch (Angelique) and being multilingual
- what living ‘underground’ and ‘aboveground’ looks like
- relationship with creativity: on knowing you’re an artist but making ‘practical choices’
- teaching art to children and being inspired by them
- burnout
- an ambition to work with hands and make art
- walking in the forests and gathering natural objects and creating from that
- her puppet as her muse
- relationship with body: computer work and how it hurts the back
- managing back pain by working out
- loving having a sensitive body and a sensitivity in general
- how textiles feel against the skin
- experiencing through the senses – needing it to be subtle in order to avoid overwhelm
- working small and subtle in her art, then enlarging it
Resources from this episode:
Connecting with Angelique:
Connecting with Janelle:
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