As a kid, Eddie Verdonk looked forward to Tuesdays.

“I went to a Catholic school growing up, and once a week they’d send us to the public school for art class. It was always on Tuesdays, so that became my favorite day of the week. It was a time, without judgment, to just create,” said Verdonk, a patient services associate at the Mary Rackham Institute.

One of Verdonk’s favorite lessons was learning about graphite realism.

“The teacher gave us half of a picture from a magazine, then we used grid paper to render the other half. That process spurred on art as a creative hobby for me,” he said.

Although his formal art classes ended after middle school, Verdonk continued to dabble in art on his own, creating portraits of friends in high school and at U-M. In the drawings, one half of the friend’s face would be in graphite realism, and the other half would be Verdonk’s abstract interpretation of the friend’s inner self.

Verdonk experimented with photorealism while he was at U-M as well.

“I recall having four days off in a row and I spent that entire time carefully rendering a photorealistic portrait of a Chinese actress. It’s still in my apartment, and I’m still very proud of it,” he said.

He also began making shadow boxes as a way to work through struggles with mental illness.

“I was turning art into more of a sublimative effort, taking my personal experiences or difficulties in school and trying to channel them into a creative effort,” he said.

Art as a lifeline

In his mid-20s, Verdonk found himself relying on art again as a coping strategy, after suffering a devastating accident.

“In 2018, a little over a year after I graduated from college, I was struck by a motorist and sustained a traumatic brain injury. I spent about a month in a medically induced coma and, as I was still recovering in the hospital, my boyfriend broke up with me. That was a real doozy,” Verdonk said.

In the hospital, Verdonk lost both time and weight and emerged looking and feeling frail. To cope with the weight loss, he began bodybuilding and gained 70 pounds in 13 months. To avoid dealing with the emotional fragility, he began drinking. Soon, alcohol became a problem and Verdonk found himself isolated from family and friends.

He used art to manage his complex feelings — and to appear capable.

“After my accident, I took my art very seriously, and some of my most successful pieces to this day were created during that time. The work was my attempt to show people I was still there mentally — and to show people who were distancing themselves from me because of my alcoholism that they were missing out,” Verdonk said.

Verdonk’s artwork became very technical and time intensive, as he embossed large sheets of paper with geometric designs and colored over them. The texture on the pieces was achieved by creating linear indentations one at time with a metal stylus, a painstaking process. One piece, Verdonk estimated, took more than 100 hours to complete. 

He also started working full time in the food industry, giving himself little downtime.

“I reentered the workforce before I was psychologically ready and ended up digging myself even deeper into addiction from all the stress,” he said.

Eventually, Verdonk sought help for his alcohol addiction, and he set a goal for himself of creating three ambitious pieces he was not “allowed” to touch if he drank.

“The first of these pieces was a green-to-turquoise-to-blue semicircular creation. The moment my pen touched the paper, it was symbolic to me. I was embarking on an arduous, lengthy journey of sobriety and I had an arduous, lengthy artistic endeavor to go along with it,” he said.

Two years after his accident, Verdonk finished the third piece. He has not had a sip of alcohol in more than four years.

Fewer rules, more fun

Today, Verdonk works full time at U-M and is planning to enroll in a master’s in social work program.

While art still plays an important part in his life, Verdonk said he is trying to take it less seriously.

“I’m reevaluating the role creativity plays in my life because I don’t want it to be so deathly serious. I want it to be fun. I want to feel liberated by my creativity — not to feel pressure to always achieve something,” he said.

Among Verdonk’s recent work is a series of bookmarks that feature pressed flowers.

“The bookmarks are a freer process, and they’re fun little artistic tasks that are done on a very limited canvas. I can do them in just a few hours,” Verdonk said.

He’s also playing with photorealism again and he’s been working on some multimedia pieces that have fewer self-imposed “rules.” He likes to work on them for an hour or so at a time, adding details he feels in the moment, using spray paint, colored pencil or calligraphy ink.

Once he completes his master’s degree, Verdonk says he might consider pursuing a career in art therapy.

“When I was still a student at the University of Michigan, I worked with Project Outreach for a year at a memory care facility. One of my activities with the residents was to lead art therapy circles. I took some of the renderings they made and turned them into abstract pieces that I still really, really have affection for,” he said.

“But while I might be interested in exploring where art could intersect with a career in mental health services,” Verdonk said, “I also think it’s important to have hobbies that are independent of what you do for a living. Making art may be healthiest for me just as expression or as a creative outlet. It doesn’t necessarily need to be a job.”

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• alcohol
• art
• Mary A Rackham Institute
• Staff Spotlight