DRAWINGS &
MixeD Media
2023 - 2024
My current visual art practice draws on a lifetime of creativity that includes acting, dance, writing, editing, photography, and quilting. While the media I’ve explored are wide-ranging, each strengthened my creative intuition and voice. 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 artist mother’s death.
The impulse to create visual art feels connected to a sense of rebirth—a literal second chance at life, as well as my unexpected return to an acting career—along with grief and the swirl of ancestral energy that lives on in me. These images of soundstages, 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 present.
—Gina Hyams
“A painting is not a picture of an experience; it is an experience.”
—Mark Rothko, artist
“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
To see more of Gina’s art, please check out her Instagram page.
Arrivederci, 2024 (graphite, color, ink, and chalk-pastel pencils, gauche, 11” x 15”)
Background Chronicles: Holding, 2024 (graphite, color, ink, and chalk-pastel pencils, gauche, 22 1/2” x 30”)
Marriage, 2024 (graphite, color, and ink pencils, 15” x 11”)
Loveseat, 2024 (graphite, color, ink, and chalk-pastel pencils, 30” x 22”)
Background Chronicles: Moving On, 2024 (gauche, ink pencils, graphite, 22 1/2” x 19”)
Background Chronicles: Points Coming Through, 2024 (color, ink, and chalk pencils, gauche, graphite, 19” x 22 1/2”)
Sectional and Kidney, 2024 (graphite, color, and ink pencils, 23” x 31”)
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”)
Background Chronicles: Rolling, Rolling, 2024 (color, ink, and chalk pencils, gauche, graphite, 22 1/2” x 30 1/4”)
Background Chronicles: On a Bell, 2024 (graphite, color and ink pencils, gauche, 22 1/2” x 30 1/2”)
Fainting Couch Summit, 2024 (graphite, color, and ink pencils, 23” x 31”)
Gossip Bench Seance, 2023 (graphite, ink, and colored pencils, glitter glue, 11” x 14”)
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”)
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")
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)