Claudette Hasenjager is a local Bloemfontein artist, a wife to Denis, and a mom to six beautiful kids. Tracey is the oldest at eighteen years old. She has two younger brothers – Vadim is fifteen years old and Johann is eleven years old. The little ones are Ondine, Olivia and Summer, aged nine, seven, and five. Claudette describes herself as a multi-passionate maker of things.
“If it involves creativity I want to know all about it – from filming and photography to printmaking, journal making, pottery, quilting, and more – I love all it all,” she says.
She feels that she needs more hours in a day and more days in her lifetime so that she can create more things. “It feels as though my ideas far outweigh my capacity to create, so even if I created non-stop every day, at some point, I would still run out of time and that breaks my heart.”
She says as a little girl she just wanted to be a mom, so much so that in matric she was voted “Most likely to have a station wagon full of kids”.
“As I got older my passion for art grew, but being a mom was always my number one priority. Denis always encouraged me to make more time for art and I resisted because that seemed so unimportant – it was always the very last thing on my list, a luxury. By the time baby number six had arrived I was starting to feel a deep need to do something to nurture myself more. That was the start of this new chapter,” she says.
In 2018, she started to evaluate why she had so much resistance to doing something just for herself – “without any purpose or service to my family,” she says. She adds that it has been a journey of reinvention and self-discovery.
On the 1st of September 2018, Claudette started her very first #365emptysquares project. “I created a collage a day for the full 365 days – I never missed a day – I was all in and I haven’t stopped creating ever since.”
In 2019, she met an American artist, Char de Rouin, and they quickly became art besties online. She says they were looking for a way to collaborate on an art project together but could not do so via the postal service. “We decided that we would each create an art journal and fill half the pages, then mail the journals to each other and fill the other half of the journal weekly on YouTube.
This is how her channel started. Since then, they have collaborated on multiple YouTube projects and have slowly grown their channels. “Last year, I decided I wanted to take YouTube more seriously and work on the Year of Courage project in collaboration with Get Messy Art.”
The focus of her YouTube channel is mostly art journaling and inspiring others to push the boundaries of their own creativity by challenging how they interoperate prompts and supplies. “This year I hope to stretch myself even further by starting to create more weekly studio vlog videos, so the growing and learning continues.”
Claudette describes her family life as “full and noisy” and she loves it that way. “Being a family of eight means that everything is amplified – our poor neighbours! But it also means that we have the best stories because there are so many to share. Because Denis and I work from home and we home-school our children I think we have a very close-knit family and the children have strong sibling bonds, which is something Denis and I really wanted to foster within the family.”
She says her kids are a source of endless inspiration. “The way they see the world and express themselves is so unique and so refreshing. Being able to experience how different each of the children are is fascinating. Watching them grow and develop their own style and personality within the same family is fascinating. They all have such strong individual voices – it makes for interesting conversation – and I am here for it.”
When Claudette and Denis are not home working or with the kids they enjoy running together. “For us running is all about having uninterrupted time together to chat, joke, dream, plan and just catch-up.”
They reserved Saturdays for their long runs and plan these around coffee spots. “Every week we decide on where we would like to have breakfast and then plan our route around that. This means we get to try out all the places in Bloem while getting in a run. It’s a win all around.”
Text: JUSTINE FORTUIN Photos: GYPSEENIA LION
