Young Karyn Healey was scrambling. The art show was just about to begin at her Minnesota art school, and her piece was not quite finished. With the help of her teacher, she frantically glued cotton balls onto the body of her lamb artwork, which her instructor excitedly repeated was “really something.” Finally, they completed the job, and as Healey watched visitors flow through the space, she was shocked to see that not only did a large number of people come to see the artwork, but many of them stopped and looked at her work. To the budding artist, this was the beginning of what she refers to as “the soup.”
“I think of my life and everything I’ve taken in, everything that has become a part of me, as one big soup,” explains Healey. “All visual memories are part of this soup, and so my art influences are just snatches of memories, all mixed together.”
Healey found herself drawn to art throughout her early childhood, all of which contributed to a deep intrigue in an art-centric lifestyle. Flashes of her memories include walking through the enormous barn of her family friends who were metal welding artists and being overwhelmed by the scale of the pieces stored within. She recalls the artists’ home, unconventional and artistic, and thought, “this is how artists live.” Later, she remembers another family friend setting up an easel outside during gatherings, oil painting with an enormous straw hat filled with brushes atop her head.
“I just saw artists as so exotic, so cool, and so different,” Healey remembers. Other flashes of artistic influence burn bright in Healey’s memory — childhood nights spent falling asleep to the sounds of live jazz music in her living room; playing the French horn and piano from fourth grade to college; and the moment when the subject matter of a familiar painting changed after shifting her perspective, leading to a profound realization that art can “change how you see things.”
“All of these little bits and pieces of memories and experiences throughout my life added to the soup,” Healey shares, “But it took many years for the flavors of that soup to develop. If anything, I avoided a life as an artist for quite some time.”
As a child of the sixties and seventies, Healey credits television shows with emerging feminist themes like “That Girl” and “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” as heavily influential in the type of career she was interested in pursuing.
“I wanted to be on the forefront of things,” she explains. “I pushed fine art aside, because it seemed so nebulous. I wanted to be cutting edge, like my icons. Their lives seemed more hip; part of a different culture.” Healey goes on to say that if there had been a show featuring a cool twenty-something artist back then, her life might have turned out differently, but those were the social influences of the day.
Healey focused her education on graphic design at Iowa State University, and for the first two years, waded through the standard art school coursework she saw as a hurdle in getting to the “real stuff.” After completing the requirements in art history, watercolor, illustration and painting, she finally got the opportunity to learn hand lettering, logo design and creative branding–the fundamentals and advanced techniques of design for which she’d been waiting. It was 1981, and Healey spent a great deal of time working with her hands and with tools like rapidographs and X-acto knives–work that required enormous focus and repeated attempts to get designs just right. These honed skills later proved to be “helpful in the soup,” she says.
Shortly after graduating college in 1983, Healey married her husband, Jim, and spent the next few decades moving from state to state with his job. They lived in the DC area, then the Midwest, Iowa, Virginia, Louisiana, Pennsylvania and Florida, and with each move came a new job for Healey. She sought out small ad agencies over big design firms, enticed by the opportunity to work one-on-one with clients, deciphering their complex needs and translating it into something accessible and instantly relatable–a theme that would resurface in her artistic style later in life. For well over a decade, Healey worked at ad agencies until she fell into her role as a mother, and her perspective shifted again.
“As I watched how my children were inundated with consumerist messages from the media, I realized that by working in advertising, I was a part of that machine,” she explains. “I just didn’t want to be a part of that any longer.”
Healey switched her focus to volunteering, helping non-profit companies make their message “as slick, sexy and dynamic as a Volkswagen car advertisement.” From 2003-2008, she helped revamp a public school art appreciation program, helping students learn about famous paintings through all areas of their curriculum. Once she handed over the reins to a colleague, it was time to move once again; this time, to Summerville, South Carolina.
In Summerville, Healey struck up a friendship with neighbor and artist Karen Silvestro, a member of the Charleston Artist Guild. When Silvestro requested Healey’s help to market an art competition, she invited her to join the Guild (a requirement of working on the event), and Healey did, though she still not identify herself as an artist in any way. But soon, Healey began receiving the Guild’s newsletters, and she was particularly drawn to one mention of a “plein air” painting class, focused on oil painting outdoors. She decided to jump in, and in 2009, after a lifetime of navigating the fringes of fine art, she finally picked up a brush and began painting.
Painting quickly became an important and passionate part of Healey’s life, and she often found herself spending eight hours in front of an easel, painting with fervor and determination. In 2013, preparing for a Magnolia Plantation art event called the “Garden of Dreams Contest,” she began to research Charleston Renaissance artists.
“I didn’t know anything about the Renaissance artists,” Healey admits, “but I found a lot of them to be similar stylistically. When everyone else zigs, I must zag, so I kept looking until I found one of them who did woodblock painting, and I thought, with my graphic background, ‘I bet I can make an oil painting look like a woodblock.’ And that’s when I did my first bold oil painting. It doesn’t look like a woodblock exactly, but that’s how I translated it. That started me on my whole graphic thing.”
Healey took her newfound style and ran with it, applying it to industrial buildings, increasing the heavy outlines, simplifying shapes, breaking things down, and studying structure. Often, she would question herself, wondering if the style was “artistic enough,” or if she was just “creating coloring book pages,” but all that changed when she read the book Van Gogh: The Life, and stumbled across a style he used called cloisonnism, described as “a post-impressionist painting style with bold and flat forms separated by dark contours.”
“I read that and saw the paintings and thought, ‘That’s it. That’s what I do,’” Healey shares. “And all of the sudden I’m really excited about interpreting this technique because there is a rich history in this form. I felt vindicated.”
Suddenly, the forms and shapes of Charleston and its surrounding areas became ripe with inspiration for Healey, and she became intrigued at the idea of painting often-depicted Charleston scenes in a manner never before seen. Focused on taking a dynamic view, using directional lines to guide, and creating graphic, stylized pieces that “jump out at you,” Healey has perfected her style into a unique, beautiful and attention-getting form, ever-changing as she produces work after work. So far, the art has been well-received, earning Healey a place in a juried Piccolo Spoleto show and as a featured artist at the Charleston Artist Guild Gallery in 2015.
The artist attributes her artistic success to her husband’s support and, of course, “the soup.”
“At my age, because of that soup of influences, everything I learned in graphic design, color theory, all of my 2-D design work, all of the people, places and things that I’ve seen in my years, all of this comes together and marinates and gives me so much to draw from. I’m just inspired and intrigued; that is why it’s good to be an old lady painter.”
Karyn Healey’s work can be viewed at www.karynhealeyart.com, or at the Charleston Artist Guild Gallery at 160 East Bay Street in Charleston.
By Jana Riley
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