Love is…CREATIVE

Story by Jenny Wonderling

INSIDE+OUT is excited to present a new series celebrating love in all its unique and beautiful forms, but not always amorous. Love Is…will offer an intimate window into rare love stories across the Hudson Valley as part of our Love in The Valley launch rolling out the rest of the year and beyond to keep us all inspired and hopeful.

How have they kept the passion flame alive after so many years? How do others overcome and persist? What wacky and wonderful ways is that friendship truest love? Or that creative expression? What if the love of someone’s life is a passion, a pet or a higher purpose? What is love…to him and her and them…and you. Get to know your neighbors with us and hear their inspiring stories, held and woven by this generous and magical place.

Meet Edie Pijpers and Paul Willis

Step into the sweet home of Edie, Paul and young Alice on any given day and one’s body intuitively exhales. Art in mid-creation is often sprawled atop the kitchen table or hardwood floors. There are usually at least a few dishes in the sink and a pot of something warm on the stove. Bright sunlight illuminates white walls and boldly colored accents, verdant plants tumbling out of their pots, everything delightfully relaxed and alive. Edie’s joyous, dreamy art hangs askew on more than a few walls as if the animated characters held within are even trying to join the fun. Yet another sourdough bread is rising in the oven. Someone is playing a tune, drawing, or deep into heartfelt and contemplative exchanges with a friend who has just breezed in. Sometimes, (often) words tumble out accented or cloaked in another language altogether, laughter a frequent companion in the mix.

These people are living a creative life without being self-conscious about it, without doing it for fame. Their lives are being immortalized in INSIDE+OUT merely to oblige a request to offer this window into their rare and hopeful world. To try and manufacture words to describe something so authentic feels contrived. Yet all this is real. This is actually how some people live and love daily, these sweet people, your neighbors, perched next to a storybook-perfect crooked red barn, walking distance from historic Rosendale’s colorful main street and alongside the meandering path of the Rail Trail where they explore daily together or with friends.

What this humble family holds and creates so naturally daily is what many only aspire to or work to generate a simulation of in social media with hashtags like #liveauthentic and #bohemianstyle. These people are too busy making art for that or reassuring those who cross their path that we all shouldn’t take ourselves too seriously and that true love is indeed very possible and mighty. Meanwhile, as beautiful and seemingly innocent as their world and art, all of it is also potent with depth and meaning. (Just take a dive into either of the videos by these creatives below.)

Meet Edie Pijpers and Paul Willis, artists, singers, animators, dreamers, writers, filmmakers, partners in life and reinvention, and parents of nine-year-old Alice, a dedicated artist in her own right.

INSIDE+OUT: What is the role of creativity in your life together?

EDIE: The role of creativity in our family and as a couple is huge. Even when we first started going out, we would sit in our teeny tiny apartment in New York and paint or have parties and make music. We even did a gig together back then. We’ve created children’s stories together. We have always been creative together in many different ways and that’s continued now with our daughter, Alice.

PAUL: For me, meeting Edie was a real energizer to be creative. One of the things I was most impressed about her was that she was a working artist who was making a living through selling her art. The first time I went into her apartment, she had quotes by various people written on a wall. There was a quote by Picasso that said, “Inspiration exists, but it has to find you working.” That stayed with me. I thought, “That’s the truth of being a creative person, that you have to get down and do the work.” Edie’s been doing that ever since I met her and she carries that light in our family. We sit and draw together; Alice is constantly making art. It’s a big part of who we are.

EDIE: If you walk into our house on any given day, work is usually everywhere. Earlier today, a whole project was on the floor. Papers and bits and pieces, a guitar, ukulele, whatever it might be. Sewing things, knitting…Alice with her clay. Paints are always everywhere, which sometimes becomes a thing, but we’re both understanding that our house is also a studio.

INSIDE+OUT: When and where did you meet?

PAUL: We met in Union Square, NY. It was Christmas time and this bundled-up woman was selling her art on the sidewalk. We had a tea urn and she would buy tea. Then I started bringing her tea and cookies for free…and we didn’t see each other for a year. That was the only encounter we had, the exchange of tea and cookies in the winter. The next year, we did the market and Edie was there to set up.

EDIE: We had this mutual friend who introduced us again and that day, we sat for three hours and talked in the booth where Paul worked. Then Paul said, “We should hang out sometime.” It wasn’t an official date, just a continuation of that initial hanging out. Then we just kept hanging out.

PAUL: There will be times when we’re in bed talking in the dark and I think, “This has been a whole long conversation that started in that booth; we’ve just been in conversation ever since.” Funny, Edie was all bundled up when we first met, so she was just a face. A year later when we met again and talked a whole afternoon, it was then I started to feel there was a connection. It wasn’t a wild attraction like when I was younger. It felt like something more grounded.

EDIE: There was attraction, but there was just a solid, gradual thing that kept us coming towards each other.

PAUL: Well, also, she was so bundled up.

EDIE: Like a mummy! I had to stand on the street all day selling in the cold.

PAUL: So it was hard to see how beautiful she was, but when we eventually moved things inside and she took her coat off, I was like, “Oh, this is a gorgeous woman!” Now we’ve been together for 13 years.

INSIDE+OUT: So you’re both immigrants. Do you think your bond has deepened because you share that experience?

EDIE: Both of us coming from different countries has definitely been a connecting point. And being in New York City (in the beginning), there are many people from different places. We had a whole friend group (of foreigners), so it fits together nicely in that way. We could understand much about each other’s lives, both Europeans in New York.

PAUL: It is bonding when you come from another place. We’ve never been able to rely on immediate family to help us care for our daughter Alice or anything, so we have to look out for each other. So, having that shared experience, even without having to communicate it, you just know where that person is coming from. All immigrants have a hidden life. I mean, a part of myself is always in that ancestral home and that’s the same for Edie; she’s always connected to that part of herself.

INSIDE+OUT: Any helpful advice that you ever received from an elder?

EDIE: My Oma…my grandma, once said as a critique of the new generations, “Women now expect their husbands to be everything; all the different roles! But one person cannot be all the things– so have a great friend to do one thing and another to do something else because sometimes we expect our partners to be too many things.” I think that was sound advice.

INSIDE+OUT: What is your favorite thing to do in the valley when not making art?

EDIE: Hiking. For dinner, our favorite family spot is the Garden Cafe in Woodstock.

INSIDE+OUT: Would you like to share more about your unique connection?

EDIE: I value our shared humor very highly, that we can laugh, keep things light, have humor about ourselves and not take ourselves too seriously. We have always been able to share that. I think that an important thing in a relationship is to be able to laugh at oneself.

INSIDE+OUT: What makes things work when other relationships are often so disposable nowadays?

EDIE: For me, what’s super important and what we’ve always done is communicate well about whatever is going on. I think that from the beginning, when something happened that one of us didn’t like, we would say it. “This is how I feel. This is what I need.” Communication is huge for us.

PAUL: Why does our relationship continue to work when many give up? I would say a big part of it is that it’s easy to lose faith in a relationship (I don’t mean in the religious sense.) It’s easy to lose faith in yourself and in the other person in a relationship. I think every relationship is an act of faith. I think we’ve stayed together because we believe in it.

INSIDE+OUT: Any advice you would tell your younger self about being in a relationship?

EDIE: I would say to be a better listener. Like when I ask a question, I do not ask it because I want validation for what I know to be true but I actually want to learn something new. It’s about being open and able to receive, to generally be curious. It’s about not having certain ideas about how your partner should be or answer or act, but allowing for the authentic them to emerge.

PAUL: Yes, and to just hear Edie’s answers as her answer. Not as my projection of what I think and projecting my own meaning onto what she is saying. Some of the fights we had in the stages of our relationship and even now come down to that. I had bad faith in what the other person was saying and did not accept it for what it was. This is something that we discovered in the course of our relationship and from reading books about how much intimate relationships are actually a projection of older relationships and our primary caregivers especially. There were so many times when Edie would say things to me and I would hear the voice of my mum. I would react to that because I couldn’t separate it from this intimate relationship with Edie.

INSIDE+OUT: Valentine’s Day is coming up. During this month of love or for any time, would you like to share how to inject a bit of spice into a relationship that’s been going on for a long time?

PAUL: First of all, it’s important to not take yourself or the other person for granted and to not assume you know them or yourself completely. One thing you can do to keep things fresh is to meet somewhere neither of you has ever been. Do something weird that you would never ordinarily do. Be imaginative so you can create a whole new version of yourself that’s interesting and that brings a whole new dynamic, too.

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Video animation and art by Edie Pijpers

Video animation and art by Paul Willis

Photography by Nils Schlebusch

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Another way is to get creative together and keep being creative together, as much as possible, in all the ways you can. HAPPY VALENTINE’S DAY, whether you are celebrating a relationship with another or simply honoring LOVE in all its forms.

Edie Pijper’s INNER CHILD & BEYOND ORACLE DECK is available here.

Her art and animations can be found here.

For poems animated by Paul Willis, click here.

For original writing by Paul Willis, click here.

Click HERE to see more of our exclusive interviews with the amazing folks who proudly call the Hudson Valley home.