Throughout my interviews with local artists, one theme consistently reappears: many of them must rely on another source of income to support their creative endeavors. Heather Young is one of the exceptions. Her business acumen allows her to be a self-sustaining artist, though, as we will see, one aspect of her practice helps fund the more creative and fulfilling aspect of her practice…
I meet the young entrepreneur and mother in her spacious Richmond Hill home and am immediately ushered into her office where the walls are lined with a variety of artwork she rotates in and out –a painting by her elder son; a drawing of her dog; a painting she grew up with from her great-aunt’s house on the southside of Savannah; a piece created by her father when he was a young boy; a painting by her stepmom who raised her from the age of eight; and a painting she made to honor her after she died of Huntington’s disease in 2012: “I’m a sentimental person,” Young says.
Young’s father climbed the corporate ladder of a paper company and moved the family around the country after his divorce when she was eight. Every summer, the artist would visit her Mom and her family back in Savannah and knew from the tenth grade that she would attend SCAD. After graduating with a BA in illustration in 2003, she has built a successful business due, in no small part, to her father’s encouragement. “My dad is a salesman. He helped pay for my education but told me I had to make a living in art if I was going to study it. Maybe things have changed now, but when I attended SCAD there was only one class on self-promotion, and most artists just don’t have a good business sense. My dad ingrained in me that I could make art, but I had to make a living doing it.”
Following graduation, Young knew she must stand out from her competition and spent long hours writing and illustrating her own Southern Girl’s Cookbook to market to key publications around town. Her strategy worked, and she landed a two-year stint creating a double-page illustrated food feature in each issue of Savannah’s now-defunct Skirt! Magazine while building up her own art business.
To help finance a new computer, her father encouraged her to make some pen and ink drawings of Savannah scenes and helped her launch a line of notecards. “He got me thinking about doing the work once and selling it a thousand times.” Today, (in a business strategy that reminds me of that of Tiffani Taylor’s) she has created a steady revenue stream through the sale of boxed notecards, tea towels, and ornaments featuring her ink drawings, and through the sale of fine art prints of oak trees and Savannah locales. She has sought out regional retailers and runs a successful Esty shop. “Etsy opened a door to me to reach a much broader market. During Covid when people couldn’t go to galleries, they were shopping for their homes online and I even saw a boost in sales.”
The meticulous pen and ink work, which she says is “good for my OCD,” has afforded her the luxury of focusing on her true passion: creating contemporary and “liberating” oil wash paintings in her huge, light filled sunporch. Moving from a 1200 square foot home on the south side of Savannah, the family (her husband attended SCAD for Film and Television and has a career at WJCL) chose this quiet Richmond Hill neighborhood because of its school district and because of the green space and safe streets for their boys. But they bought this house because of the sunporch-turned-art studio!
“My heart has always been in painting,” Young says, relating that she learned the technique of oil wash she still uses today from SCAD professor Pernell Johnson when she was part of the University’s Rising Star program between her junior and senior year of high school. “He was teaching me to paint in a subtractive way and to use negative space, and that stuck.” Starting with an acrylic underpainting before drawing out the image in pencil on a wood panel (an easier surface than canvas from which to subtract paint), Young adds thin color washes of water-based oils. For example, she may use a thin wash of magenta to tint the whole panel, and once it dries just enough she goes in with erasers to rub the magenta away in certain places, before adding another wash of another color, and then repeats the process: some paintings may have up to 12 washes. To finish the piece, she often highlights with Prismacolor pencils “to beef up the color.”
Color washing and erasing seems the perfect way to portray her signature strands of gray and white Spanish moss which sway from the branches of her trees. The resulting work is sometimes muted and soft, almost pastel like in texture, but other work can be vivid as she experiments with such bold color combinations as bright magenta and red, rich purple and verdant green. Her technique and style are unique, contemporary, and distinctively her own. “It’s liberating for me to play with color, but I also look at it as documentation of place; Every tree I paint is a real tree," she says.
Carmen Aguire, the talented director of the former Grand Bohemian Gallery in the Mansion on Forsyth, discovered Young’s pen and ink work on Instagram and carried it in the gallery. But, more importantly, she was the first person to recognize the commercial viability and beauty of Young’s paintings giving her a solo show, “Canopy,” in 2019. Aguire says, “Heather is a fabulous illustrator, but her passion and soul is in painting. I didn’t doubt my intuition when offering Heather a show at the gallery and I wasn’t wrong. Her abstraction of form and color speaks to everyone. And that ability is a gift.”
Utilizing her strong social media skills, Young featured 31 days of creative practice on her Instagram account in January. “I was in the studio making something every single day and documenting it. I felt happier. It’s so hard to juggle the marketing side of the art world - answering emails, packaging things, and sending off Etsy orders - with finding quiet time to work in the studio.” Thankfully, she has built up her career to the point where she can turn down drawing commissions (like many illustrators, she has drawn her share of dogs, cats, and homes to supplement her income).
Young thoroughly enjoys working from home - “My seven-year-old is my little studio buddy. He’s out here all the time” - and relishes having the freedom and flexibility to take her ten-year-old to swim practice and swim meets, and to pick up both boys from the bus stop. The business-savvy artist concludes, “I just want to encourage people to not give up. There’s this misconception that you can’t be a working artist. But you can. If my ship sinks or sails, it’s on my shoulders. And I like that.”
Heather Young’s website is www.heatherlyoung.com and her Instagram handle is @fly_young_studio. Find her paintings at Deep South Photopoint Gallery and at Arts on the Coast Gallery in Richmond Hill, and at the new Gallery 8 at Ann Street Lofts in Savannah. Find her pen and ink work at ShopSCAD, in retail stores, and in her online Etsy shop. Young also serves on the board of Arts on the Coast and is helping to spearhead their “Art in Bloom” fundraiser on April 13…. More on that event in a column next month.
