DRAWINGS
2023 - 2024
My current visual art practice draws on a lifetime of creativity that includes acting, dance, writing, editing, photography, and quilting, as well as drawing and painting. While the media I’ve explored are wide-ranging, each strengthened my creative intuition, voice, and courage. These drawings started pouring out of me spring 2023 shortly after my husband had a successful kidney transplant and coinciding with the 10-year anniversary of my mother’s death. The impulse to draw feels connected to a sense of rebirth—a literal second chance at life—as well as to grief and the swirl of ancestral energy that lives on in me. These images of vintage furniture and travel and food memories are filled with life-affirming color, theatricality, and inside jokes. The compositions are expressionistic narratives that poetically grapple with the past and a shimmering future. —Gina Hyams
“Gina has a great eye and this series of drawings is just so sensitive and true. Her curiosity and delight are evident.”
—Joanna Cotler, artist
Loveseat, 2024 (graphite, color, ink, and chalk-pastel pencils, 30” x 22”)
Scene Study, 2024 (graphite, ink, and chalk-pastel pencils, 23” x 30.5”)
Conversation with My Mother, 2023 (graphite and ink pencils, 11” x 14”)
Gossip Bench Seance, 2023 (graphite, ink, and colored pencils, glitter glue, 11” x 14”)
Fainting Couch Summit, 2024 (graphite, color, and ink pencils, 23” x 31”)
Sectional and Kidney, 2024 (graphite, color, and ink pencils, 23” x 31”)
Take 3: Memory of Pink Cake at a Mexican Rodeo, 2023 (color pencils, 18" x 24")
Whispering Bench, 2024 (graphite, ink, and colored pencils, glitter glue, 11” x 14”)
Fainting Couch, 2024 (graphite, color, and ink pencils, 23” x 30 1/2”)
Take 2: Memory of Pink Cake at a Mexican Rodeo, 2023 (color pencils, 24" x 18")
Talavera Ginger Jar, 2023 (color pencils 24" x 18")
Portrait of a Marriage, 2023 (color pencils, 9" x 12")
Mexico Memory: Breakfast at Hacienda El Santuario, 2023 (graphite and color pencils, 24" x 18")
Mexico Memory: Hacienda el Santuario Fountain, 2023 (graphite and color pencils, 24" x 18")
Memory of Orange Juice at the Villa Montaña, 1997, 2023 (color pencils, 18" x 24")
Yellow Fiestaware Coffee Pot, 2023 (color pencils, 12" x 9")
Memory of Strawberry Salad with Jicama Stars and Chocolate Chips at St. Orres, 1989, 2023 (color pencils, 24" x 18"
P-O-P-C-O-R-N: t i m e, 2023 (color pencils, 24" x 18")
Houston Medical Center, view from an eighth floor waiting room, 2023 (color pencils, 9" x 12")
Memory of First Tomato Sandwich, August 1984, 2023 (color pencils, 18" x 24")
Memory of La Quinta Inn, Fort Worth, Texas (color pencils, 14" x 11")
First Pancakes in Albuquerque, 2023 (color pencils, 11" x 14")
Tanglewood Picnic Memory on a Magic Carpet Ride—specifically the memory of the 2014 Country Curtains “Christmas at the Pops” Tanglewood picnic whisky sour punch presented on a red-and-white gingham tablecloth, 2023 (color pencils, 18" x 24"...now in the collection of The Red Lion Inn, Stockbridge, Massachusetts)