Jos Poeder
Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, graduated 2010
https://www.kabk.nl/en/
Photoacademy Amsterdam, graduated 2002
https://www.calderacademie.nl/creativiteit-media/fotoacademie/
Her grandfather was a painter, her uncle a photographer: for Jos Poeder, art was always close at hand. But it took her a while to find her own path. Immediately after high school, Jos Poeder went to The Royal Academy of Art in The Hague: she wanted to become a painter, just like her grandfather. “It was a huge disappointment: after just six months, I’d already had enough. It turned out to be a program that required a lot of confidence, and I was too afraid of failing. Poeder went traveling and visited Canada, the United States, Germany, and Switzerland, among other places. Once back in the Netherlands, she worked at the Leiden University Library for ten years and soon after, off she went again, travelling. “Wherever I was, I worked—as a cashier, a nanny, whatever needed to be done.”
Three Jobs
In the end, Greece turned out to be the country she fell in love with, especially the southern part of Crete. “I wanted to stay there forever and did everything I could to make ends meet: I worked as a receptionist and later as a guide for English and German tourists. In the end I moved to Athens, where at one point I had three jobs at the same time. Until I had to conclude that Greece, at that time, was simply too poor to make a living by yourself, on your own.”
Sunday
When she turned forty, she went back to the Netherlands. In tears. “It was so hard for me! And at first, I just couldn’t get used to it at all. The Netherlands, with all its timetables and nothing spontaneous. Where people go to IKEA on Sundays instead of going out together to eat. But I had no choice.” She worked during the day and attended a photography academy in the evenings. And little by little, art school faded into the background. “I thought: I’m going to be a photographer.”
Mud
After graduating from the photography academy, Poeder juggled various jobs simultaniously next to her photographic work. Until art began to pull at her again. “I painted once a week at the Free Academy, and after a while, I just knew I had to keep going with it.” She re-enrolled at the Royal Academy, and this time she did finish the program. “It was still scary and not easy, but the difference was that now I knew I could do it. At first, I still felt like my work was an extension of myself, but gradually I learned to see it as separate from me. It finally clicked in my fourth year, and from then on I was also able to handle criticism. It’s like one of my teachers said: “You walk in like a ping-pong ball covered in mud. And here, at the academy, we knock the mud off of you so you can bounce better.”
Hard Work
Poeder thinks the idea that you express yourself through your art is nonsense. “You are not your work. Of course there’s such a thing as inspiration, but that’s just the idea that gets things going. Incidentally, that inspiration often comes precisely when you’re doing nothing – like when you’re staring blankly in space with a cup of coffee. But once you have an idea, it’s just a matter of working really hard to find the right way to tell your story. That could be through a photograph, but it could also be through a collage or an installation. I always thought I wanted to be a painter. It turned out I’m a visual artist.”
March 10, 2015, Anne-Margot van Eijck for www.delft.nl