Nikki Ty's photostream

Nikki Ty was born in Canada. At an early age she divided her attention between frenetically covering every piece of paper she could locate with her oddly disturbing drawings and playing the piano with wild flourishes borrowed from her idol, Glenn Gould. Finally with a Canada Council grant, the music won out and she moved to New York where she graduated from Juilliard.

But shortly after graduation she emigrated to India where she lived and worked as a graphic artist and art critic for twenty years. Her highly controversial black and white ink drawings caught the attention of the media and her work features in private collections in India, Canada and the Middle East.

But the overwhelming emotional content of her work, eventually became too onerous and when she returned to the West to settle in Hawaii, she put away her drawings. She turned to jewelry design and mastered the ancient Hawaiian art of featherwork. Today her innovative featherwork is eagerly sought by collectors of oceanic art and her feather lei are treasured by the local Hawaiian community.

' I turned to making things of beauty. I began to see my drawings as self-indulgent. I was scratching at wounds and watching the blood with terrible fascination. I began to see my art as pain trotted out for public view. It became distasteful', she said recently in an interview.

But a couple of years ago, while critiquing a biography of Frieda Kahlo, Nikki became intrigued by the artist's deeply emotional ties to her frankly autobiographical work.

" I began to reconsider. By this time I was learning the intricacies of water colors, which were so diametrically diffferent from my rigid and meticulous graphics of years ago. I was creating appealing and attractive pieces and enjoying the interplay of paper and paint. The materials were contributing to my work ... I wasn't rigorously controlling ink on paper. I loved it. The emotional content was not consuming. It was play.

But Frieda Kahlo's work taunted me. Because at the heart of powerful work, there must be emotion. And as I pulled the old drawings out of storage I could see that there was beauty in pain. And that time ... and maturity ..... had given me respite. That I could feel and remember and conjure up an extraordinary range of emotion without that danger of being consumed and destroyed by it, I could stand back a bit and see myself and my emotions and my art as part of a more universal condition.

So now I'm free. I can choose. And I can find tremendous satisfaction in the beauty of a single flower resting on a batik ground as well as a figure cringing alone in a moment of despair. It's all there. It's all good.

Today ... I play with my "Clever Cats" ... recalling a childhood family friend from Disney Studios who brought me the wonderful cels after the animators were through with them. Collector's items today, I imagine how those artists would love the progams we have today.

www.theclevercat.etsy.com

Or .... I grab a piece of paper and wrestle with it, crumpling it and splashing color on it ... and conjure up the petroglyphs on rough stones of my adopted island.

Perhaps tomorrow a digital print .... balancing my Wacom tablet on my knee and nudging the gaussian curves with my mouse. Adult graffitti! What fun!

Or ... somber .... seeing the rape and dispair screaming at me through the nightly news, I go back to the drawings of thirty years ago and understand their power ... not just a young privileged woman's rage .... but something universal. And I know I share in that pain with a maturity I didn't have long ago.

This is my world ..... and now I can share it in ways unimagineable twenty years ago. I rest my hands on my piano and know I can play that Mozart Fantasia with the best .... and now with YouTube can share that too.

Oh what a wonderful world!