Heather Day I Transparency
By Laura Smith
Transparency is most commonly understood to be clear or sheer, a visually uninhibited space in which all the curated particularities are available for the unique viewer perspective. However, consider a contemporary artist who possesses an active proclivity for transparency. Heather Day is such an artist, however her compositions are not see-through in the obviousness you’d imagine, she herself injects a transparent quality in all that she creates; like windows between her and her followers, behind which she creatively explores and vulnerably experiences the connections to the world around her. Not unlike the adorable Oliver People’s like frames that compliment her sweet hipster sense of style.
Day is a contemporary artist working in a covetable live-in, loft studio in Dogpatch, San Francisco. Surrounded by beautiful cottage white walls, grand antique factory-like windows and lush green indoor trees. Her canvases and paintings scale the indoor architecture, while some settle on the splattered concrete floor.
Here she has created for herself a work environment saturated with natural and inspirational elements. If googled, there are a mélange of interviews relating to her artistic history and personal development where she tells stories, accompanied by personal photographs, about being raised in different parts of the country, influenced by vast geographical terrains, including the prolific impact the redwood trees and Land’s End have had on her most recent work. However, nothing quite compares to her own blog that she updates regularly with personal narratives and photos, openly and intimately expressing how her ideas and growth are connected to her creativity and production.
Although, she’ll confidently admit her instagram account @heatherdayart also plays an integral role in manifesting meaningful relationships with fans and patrons that not only impacts how she exhibits her work, but also contributes to her overall prosperity. Day’s raw openness to expressing what she experiences onto a canvas or a wall, and her dedication to candidly communicating the way her mind perceives and absorbs the influences around her is what makes her transparency so special and her work so engaging. She’s genuinely relatable. Her work is approachable, and her practice is inviting. The viewer is allowed a whimsical tour of her day-to-day, revealing in the delicate and eloquent stories that use her coextensive gift of language to illustrate the aesthetic beyond the paint. And, if beyond the paint (and social media) is where the beholder wants to go, they need to look no further than her most recent contribution to uniting people, art and culture: Studio Table. Studio Table is the culmination of the senses, uninhibited by fear, misunderstanding, or judgment; it is an opportunity offered to those with the desire to be engaged in transparency and dialogue with others while joined together in eating dinner prepared by a private chef. Defined as a “fine dining concept that challenges expectations,” it gives any person or group of people interested in having an inspired experience together a space that stimulates creativity and integration; wondrously taking place within the personal home-studio of Heather Day, surrounded by the smell of her paint and the abundance of her work.
Her work ranges from paint to non-traditional materials, small canvases and paper sketches to large indoor murals. The smears of concerting colors that are layered onto these backdrops are thoughtful and rhythmic. Each of the individual forms stands only upon the might of the next, albeit from the brightness, density, structure, or depth, all in sound balance. These dynamic variables of shapes, shades and sizes make for a flexible movement that finds redwood-like strength within the company of the others.
Day’s chimerically abstract compositions do one of the most important things a piece of art can do, they take you somewhere; her work is classically strong and romantically transparent, naively giving the viewer the gentle space and permission to also be transparent and inspired. This style of art that adversely gives space rather than takes space is extraordinary and likely why she’s represented by and exhibited in a copious amount of collectives and galleries around the world. Recent exhibitions include: The Affordable Art Fair in New York City, The Wall Gallery in Oakland, The Soho Art House in Los Angeles, she’s also represented by The Tappan Collective. Upcoming, but not limited to, she’ll be working on more large-scale murals, along with a solo show at Gensler Architects in San Francisco. But keep a close eye on Day’s social media, she’ll show you all she does daily in the blink of a shutter, you don’t want to miss it.
Heather´s next solo show will be this fall in San Francisco with the support of Athen B Gallery.
