Vanessa Yanow
RISD '98 [Painting]
At the age of 18, Vanessa moved to Seville, Spain to waitress
for nine months at the 1992 World's Fair before embarking on a year's voyage
through Pakistan, India, Nepal, and Thailand. During this time she began to
draw every day, prefiguring the lifelong pursuit visual arts was to become.
She moved back to Montreal and applied with success to the Rhode Island School
of Design. There, she majored in painting, while working primarily with alternative
materials to paint. She drew with sands, earth, and spices and painted with
handmade, natural pigments. Realizing that her paintings always seemed to incorporate
sculptural elements, and having found an affinity for working with sand (glass'
raw material), she convinced the painting department to allow her to study
hot glass as well. Unable to double major, she only got a taste for glass for
one year before she and twelve other students were accepted into the European
Honours Program in Rome. She left for Europe early to work for three months
as an intern at the Pont-Aven School of Art in Brittany, France. Then she made
her way to Italy where she worked, and finished her Fine Arts Degree.
After graduation she moved to Lisbon, Portugal where she waitressed again, for nine months at the 1998 World's Fair. She then headed down south with a couple of girlfriends. They hitchhiked their way into Africa. Starting in the south of Spain and into Morocco, they made their way, on a military convoy, through the land mines of southern Morocco into Mauritania. Their voyage continued down into the Casamance of Senegal where they stayed for a couple of months. Vanessa then continued solo, traveling for another three months through Mali, Burkina Faso and Ghana. During her travels in Africa she drew prolifically and made it her personal mission to find local fiber artists from different regions who could teach her traditional dying techniques such as bogolon, indigo, and batik. She lived inside a baobab tree, sometimes under the stars, and on the beach, but she mostly stayed in villages with the locals, and often as the only foreigner around.
In 1999, Vanessa moved back to Montreal in order to pursue art full-time. She discovered Montreal's vibrant and committed community of hot glass artists, who encouraged her to re-enter the glass world. She bought a torch and taught herself how to flame work. Vanessa has been creating art and exhibiting as a full-time professional artist since 2003. She is a recipient of several scholarships, awards, and grants from such bodies as The Canada Council for the Arts, Le Conseil des Arts et Lettres du Quebec, L'Office Franco-Quebecois pour la Jeunesse, Le Conseil des Metiers D'Arts, Fonds Jeunesse du Quebec, and Penland School of Crafts. Her work has been reviewed and highlighted in several magazines and newspapers. She has had solo shows in Quebec and Ontario, and participated in group shows throughout Quebec, Ontario, USA, Europe, Qatar and Japan. Vanessa currently lives and works in Montreal at the Long Haul, a visual art workspace and gallery for 30 local artists that she co-founded in 2001 with her life partner, John Tinholt.