Erin Nicole Henry is an Atlanta-based artist with a passion for nature and depicting the human body. Her oil paintings contain images that bring awareness to issues affecting marginalized groups and serious things. While her work has been featured in group shows for many years, Henry’s first solo exhibition, “Open Window Kisses,” is on view through Jan. 14 at Cat Eye Creative. The artist joined “City Lights” host Lois Reitzes via Zoom to talk more about the work she’s displaying.
Interview highlights:
On an artist’s journey since the beginning of her life:
“My parents have said, pretty much ever since I could hold a pencil – which they even said I started doing quite young – I have always been doodling all over my homework,” said Henry. “I remember that art class in elementary school was absolutely my favorite. I couldn’t wait to go about two or three times a week.”
She continued, “I think it starts out as a part of every child’s life, and unfortunately, we hear the saying a lot… ‘Everybody’s born creative. At some point, we just grow into adults,’ and, you know, deal with the real world, and we stop nurturing that creative side of us. And I think I’ve just been blessed to have the opportunities and support and love and everything that has enabled me to just keep going with it. So I’ve never been able to picture my life without creating, I think. Every single day I wake up with a goal to at least make something.”
Why Henry visualizes issues like sexual assault through “expressionistic realism:”
“It’s part of a way to express my frustration with the world,” Henry said. “There were 49 displayed pieces for this piece I had called, ‘It Could Be You,’ where I picked off random faces from the internet. I mean, art is the way to start a conversation, and people love talking about art and what it means, and for so long, and even still, a lot of the things that I paint don’t even necessarily have an intention towards a theme. It just is there to start a conversation, and I can put my feelings or frustrations or happiness or sadness into a painting, and then that’s my time I get to have with the painting. And then I get to, at some point, I say ‘abandon’ it, and then it’s the world’s.”
“The times I do create things with intention, like the ‘It Could Be You’ series, I saw people responding to it really interestingly, and people wanted to be painted, even though it’s kind of a dark thing to be painted in this context,” Henry added. “Not everybody liked it. Keep in mind, too, that this whole collection appeared in a pretty traditional, pretty conservative area in Georgia. So some people thought it was, I guess you could say, a little ‘too edgy.’ Keep in mind, these are just little squares that have faces on them, so there’s nothing directly graphic or anything about the piece itself. But… I heard a comment that said, ‘Well, maybe people wouldn’t get sexually assaulted if they didn’t wear this…’ So this is bringing up some even very uncomfortable situations and conversations.”
How the works in “Open Window Kisses” were created:
“My newest collection, ‘Open Window Kisses,’ is the newest work that I’m really proud of, because I got to shoot all of the original photos. My lovely friend Emily was the model, and then my lovely friend Trap was also there styling and vibe-producing, and we had a really great fun day, really just hunkering down and shooting a lot of content for me to paint for the next year,” Henry said. “We got some beautiful images, and it’s really nice to be able to paint from an original photo that I shot myself, because it feels like I truly, 100 percent, made this. It feels much more original than when I do use the resources online I have for other models.”
“It is different, I think, than my other work. It’s a little more realistic, a little less expressionistic with the painting style, but it is probably some of my most technically well-done work, in my opinion. I use a lot of bright, bright, saturated, high-chroma colors, and the images were originally shot with bright magenta and green lights. So it was definitely a challenge, and lots of building layers of oil paint, to be able to replicate this kind of crazy bright light in that way. And I’m very excited about it, because it literally feels like when I look at these paintings, they emanate light.”
Erin Nicole Henry’s solo exhibition “Open Window Kisses” is on view through Jan. 14 at Cat Eye Creative. More information is available at https://www.cateye-creative.com/erin-nicole-henry-open-window-kisses-solo-exhibition
