A Mebane artist’s new collection, titled “Human Nature,” will be on display at the Mebane Arts and Community Center beginning Monday, February 7 through early April.
Tyamica Mabry, of Mebane, is a self-taught artist who got her start in art a little over a decade ago, in 2010, when her daughter began drawing. Her daughter is a natural artist, something, Mabry said, she always figured she inherited from her dad.
So, usually, Mabry would just watch her daughter draw but, one day, she decided to try her hand at it and discovered she, too, is an artist.
“I started out drawing cartoon characters and, eventually, got into painting. I’m self-taught, I learned everything just by trial and error, watching YouTube videos,” Mabry said. “My school background is technical, as far as computers and working with numbers and stuff, so it’s very opposite.”
One of her biggest inspirations is her daughter. Another is her fiancé, who passed away in August. This tragedy was particularly influential in creation of her series, “Human Nature.”
“This series has helped me get through a very difficult time. Art has been therapeutic for me, it’s been a way to release some of my emotions,” Mabry said. “Most of the paintings in this series have been created since that date. I poured a lot of emotion into these paintings.”
The series captures “beauty of nature and incorporates human likeness into each scene,” Alamance Arts Visual Arts Director Roarie Bishop said.
“Love, sadness, growth, spirituality, and acceptance have all been depicted,” Bishop added. “While this collection is very personal to Tyamica, she encourages others to embrace the healing benefits of nature and art. During a time when human interaction is minimal, connecting to nature may fill a void within you.”
For Mabry, her goal in creating each work in the collection was to show the deep, central connection between humans and nature.
“I like painting portraits and faces, I also like painting flowers and I’m learning a little more on how to paint landscapes,” she said. “So, just putting those two things together, two things that I really enjoy painting, and also just making a connection to how connected we are to nature.”
Mabry said that, especially in light of the Covid-19 pandemic, more interaction with nature is needed and is as important as human interaction.
“We really need human interaction and since we can’t get that as much, we need to interact more with nature, because there’s a lot of healing in nature, just being around it, listening to the sounds and breathing in the fresh air, all of that and looking at the beautiful scenery,” she said.
As evident in her “Human Nature” collection, Mabry is a skilled and creative portrait painter who prefers to make local celebrities and citizens the subjects of her portraits.
“I think that celebrating those people that we know – our own local celebrities, even if people somewhere else don’t know who they are, we know how important they are,” she said. “That is just the way that I like to express that – to paint pictures of them.”
In her 2018 collection “Faces,” Mabry did just that, painting portraits of local poets and musicians in the Greensboro area who have inspired her. It was her way of repaying them for the inspiration.
Mabry’s work, which includes paintings as well as other handmade items like earrings, tote bags and t-shirts, can be found at typesofher.com and on Instagram (@typesofher), Facebook (facebook.com/typesofher) and YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCfzLyeQvQTPVQ6FXHSsLVJA).
