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THE LAND CHAPTER 8

Beatrix (Bix) Fife

2020.06.26

Today, the world is suddenly changing.

While I write these words, a virus is spreading beyond borders. There are lockdowns in countries, environmental and social issues, huge challenges ahead for us humans on the earth, and suffering.

 

How can I not be thinking of this, while writing about how I started exploring my inner self through drawing.

Back then, 17 and a half years old, I moved from where I grew up, to the country I was supposed to belong to. It made me lose hold of what I had built up in my childhood, language, nature, climate, ways of thinking, relation to people. I found myself losing the landmarks I had built inside.

 

Today many of us lose our jobs, our loved ones, our health, our stability: in this new world we might lose our landmarks too. We have new challenges and new perspectives.The sea is rough, but there is a horizon line somewhere. It is always there, like in a drawing, unless you don’t want to see it.

I continue to draw, looking at other artists’ drawings, learning new ways, traveling, also traveling in the mind. Throwing many drawings away, letting them go, I keep the ones I need, for later.

 

These drawings are landmarks. Small mirrors of the self in time and in space.

acrylic on canvas board, 41cm x 31cm

Beatrix (Bix) Fife
Beatrix (Bix) Fife プロフィール

Born in Stockholm, Bix grew up in Rome in a Norwegian, British and Italian family, speaking 3 languages. At the age of 7, her family moved to Paris, where she completed her secondary studies in French schools and also learned to play the classical flute.

While studying at university and management school in Oslo she also started to paint and to do theatre. She was a trainee for 6 months in NYC at the New Dramatists’ studio. She then studied art in Oslo and at the Fine Arts Academy of Budapest. In 1990 she won a prize in an art competition in Austria, giving her the opportunity to come to Japan. In Kyoto, she studied Japanese calligraphy and worked with performance art between 1995 and 1999, with philosopher Michael Lazarin and musician Mamoru Katagiri (Marki) and played music for dance companies in the Kansai area from 1997 to 1999. She moved to Brussels in 1999 continuing to paint, to exhibit works and to give concerts. As well as learning to play jazz at the Music Academy of Brussels, she played in the Bix Medard electropop group and founded the Brussels Language Activities, school of language and culture. She received a Master’s degree in Sciences du Langage at the University of Franche-Comté in Besançon, in 2008.

After moving back to Tokyo in 2010 she started Bix&Marki, a musical duo of original French songs. Bix is a painter, a singer, a musician and a linguist. She sings, plays the flute and writes the lyrics of all the Bix&Marki songs. While working on her music and painting, Bix teaches French at universities, specializing in role-play and language through art and personal expression.