What is campus life like at MIU? >

Home of Consciousness-Based EducationAccredited

An accredited non-profit university
with on-campus & online degrees >

Founded by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi

A non-profit university with on-campus and online degree programs

Home of Consciousness-Based Education

Accreditation: Higher Learning Commission

Visit Us > Apply > Request Info >
Founded by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi

A non-profit university with on-campus and online degree programs

Home of Consciousness-Based Education

Accreditation: Higher Learning Commission

Request Info > Apply > Visit Us >
Request Info > Apply > Visit Us >

Canadian artist Olga Campbell is one of my all-time favorite people and best friends. For this interview, we sit on the sunny back deck of her home, overlooking the English Bay and Vancouver’s North Shore Mountains.

olgaOlga travels in and out of Fairfield often, taking courses and visiting her many friends in the town. In 1987, as a first year student enrolled at Emily Carr Institute of Art & Design in Vancouver, BC, she traveled to MIU to interview and film five sculptors working in the MIU Art Department and their teacher, Professor Jim Shrosbree. She’s been a teacher of Transcendental Meditation in the city of Vancouver since 1970, and recently hosted a talk by MIU president Dr. Bevan Morris in her Vancouver home during Morris’ international speaking tour.

“TM has a huge effect on my art and my approach as an artist,” says Olga, “I feel happy and expanded inside. That feeling is there most of the time no matter what is happening in life. I see and respond to things differently, without judgment. There’s amazing sense of joy, and energy that’s magnified a hundredfold in the process of creating art.”
Olga has mounted numerous shows in Metro Vancouver, featuring work primarily in ceramics, printmaking, metal sculpture, photography, and mixed media. She describes her digital collage work of overlapping photos, clay pieces and paint, featured in her recent two-artist show The Hidden, as “a reflection of my life.”

As the daughter of a Holocaust survivor, Olga’s work is strongly influenced by the “difficult and emotional journey into her family’s past.” Her 2005 one-man show Whispers Across Time at the Sidney & Gertrude Zack Gallery was a tribute to members of her family who perished in the genocide, most of whom were artists.

“I deal with urban and gritty things,” she tells me, “I see ‘the divine” in everything, the beauty in all of it.” In her first art book, Graffiti Alphabet (dedicated to her grandson), Olga combined her passion for photography with her love of graffiti. Vancouver artist and blogger Marja-Leena Rathje describes Graffiti Alphabet as, “a visual tour of the graffiti of Vancouver, the beautiful power, colors, designs and energy of street art. Olga has collaged hundreds of photographs taken over six years into a fabulous work of art of its own and a tribute to all anonymous street artists.”

olga2“Art is about process,” Olga tells me, “I can start with an idea or a theme, but I don’t plan it out. It’s spontaneous, serendipitous, with a frenzy of activity and what happens by chance. There’s some thinking involved, but it goes on impulse. I don’t like restriction. I can’t follow recipes (when I cook), I make a total mess, and that’s how I paint. For me, art is totally freeing and expressive. It’s about having fun and creating a seamless connection to my environment, so it’s more than just having fun.” She also admits that, “it can be frustrating at times, but I just work through it in a space where I am just being and doing.”

I ask Olga how she knows when a piece is finished. “I find that when I’m with a finished piece, there’s an exchange of energy,” she says, “My response to art is a feeling. It’s an emotional response. I know a piece works when it gives me back that energy or feeling. When a sense of wholeness, completeness and well-being arrives, then the piece is complete for me.”

The gallery of Campbell’s work below was created for her most recent 2016 exhibition The Hidden, a two-artist show with fellow digital collage Canadian artist and psychologist Larry Green at the Gertrude & Sidney Zack Gallery in Vancouver, BC:

Mo Ellis is inspired by art, issues, and progressive ideas. Mo Ellis’ online and print contributions as a writer, editor, website & mobile app project manager, PR and online media director 
have appeared at: "O" magazine, The Huffington Post, The New York Times, The Des Moines Register, Surface Design Journal, The Iowa Source, KRUU-FM, Iowa Public Radio, Dr. Mercola and Dr. Oz.