by Norm Powers . photos by Matt Rose
Asheville artist Ginger Huebner thought she was going to be an architect. “I was branded the ‘artsy one’ in the family from a young age,” Ginger says of her early creative interests, not apparent anywhere else in the family. Her father was a businessman and her mother, although attracted to the arts, was too busy raising a family. A career in architecture seemed a good blend of artistic talent and the promise of steady work, so Ginger soon found herself at Virginia Tech. But then something happened.
“I could never quite commit to the idea of practicing architecture,” she recalls. “But I couldn’t put my finger on what I should be studying instead. Then I started developing these drawings that I would do with chalk pastel and collage as I was working on a project.” The drawings mystified her until it came time in her fifth year to prepare her final thesis project. The drawings, she realized, could complement the standard elevations and sections of her architectural plans. “I could have a set of artwork that would be able to communicate with the architectural drawings,” Ginger explains. “I realized these drawings were the emotion of the projects. The color was literally allowing me to share a feeling, instead of a wall or window.” It was a whole new artistic language for her, the components of what she would later call “visual translations.”
Although she did, in fact, work at an architectural firm in Seattle after graduating, the new medium she’d discovered soon blossomed into a full-time endeavor. It has since produced an assemblage of works rich in color, emotional content and narrative force, her most recent work produced from her studio in the River Arts section of Asheville, where Ginger settled about three years ago. Her many private commissions have ranged from corporate communications to memorializing family histories, while her independent work has drawn gallery viewers attracted by her palette of earth tones underlying bright blues, yellows and greens. “I use chalk pastel for all the color,” Ginger says, “and I mix them with my fingers right on the paper. I’ve always loved color, and do think it’s somewhat of a spiritual and emotional thing, the way I choose them and the way they blend together each time.”
Her work is figurative and specific in its images, perhaps a nod to the architectural training that proved the catalyst for creative exploration. “My early work was very structured, and often involved actual building facades and sections,” Ginger says. “It’s grown more loose over the years, but the representational use of imagery is still there. The imagery is the heart of the story that’s being told.” Particularly striking are works like Home, an eight-by-eight-inch work on board that captures, in its figure of a bent woman preparing food, laundry fluttering on the line, and two placid sheep gazing out at the viewer, the essence of domestic tranquility. Hope, a somewhat larger work on paper, places smiling, laughing children conquering a jagged landscape with future possibilities.
Sometimes a specific place will start the process, as when Ginger was asked to create a large piece for the bedroom of the 2008 Southern Living Idea House. “I went out to visit the site and was walking up the hill opposite the house. There was a magnificent oak tree, barren of leaves, just stretching left and right, and that was the inspiration for the tree in Reaching. The collaged pieces that make up the tree are magnified views of different cross sections of wood.” Other works, Ginger says, can begin with a song, or poem or a bit of prose that puts an image in her mind.
But Ginger’s work isn’t just confined to her studio. She’s the founder of Asheville’s Roots + Wings School of Art, a creative outreach that provides art training for children and adults. “Our mission is to provide unique visual arts education opportunities for people of all ages, ability and functionality,” Ginger says. “Art is a wonderful tool for learning. Asheville has a tremendous pool of talent in the visual arts that I’m blessed to be part of, and I want to allow all ages to enjoy this creativity.” Partnership opportunities are being sought with schools, churches and other organizations interested in reinvigorating education in the arts at a time when public funding for such efforts is dwindling.
It’s all part of a creative flow that’s carried Ginger along since discovering how the “pretty pictures,” as she calls them, of her college years could reach deep into the emotional lives of viewers, more than a set of blueprints ever could. The stories are everywhere, and right now they have something to do with birds. “This seemed to begin after my four-year-old daughter and I were watching some birds sitting on a wire, and I asked her what she thought they were doing,” Ginger says. “She said they were having a meeting.” The result was the first in a series of works featuring birds that Ginger is planning, this initial creation bearing the very name The Meeting. What might the next one be? “We’ll see,” is all Ginger will say.
See more of Ginger Huebner’s work at www.gingerhuebner.com.
