Artist profile

By Neil Schloesser
Contributing Writer

Kristine Thykeson believes windows are the eyes to the soul. Thykeson, a mixed medium artist, is the featured artist at Atomic Coffee in Fargo in July and at the Moorhead location in August. She has approximately 20 paintings at the coffee shop, all of them featuring a girl with large expressive eyes and hair that is made from her favorite books. “The hair comes from poetry, inspirational books….I’ve even gone through cookbooks, dictionaries, thesauruses, anything that is weathered and aged, [and] has that smell, that old book smell, it makes me feel safe and comfortable,” Thykeson said.

Her paintings are full of women with rich, dark eyes that glow and shine from across the room. They are purposely contrasted with pale skin and pale hair. They are intoxicating and draw the audience into their deep, loaded expressions. Women play such a prominent role because Thykeson is a female and feels a natural connection. Thykeson said, “The female form and the expressions they carry and the emotions they carry in their face, that’s a big part of my art, showing emotion through my art. If you look at the eyes, the face, and the hair, [it] tells a story.”

Thykeson has always been drawing and creating but did not get serious about it until a few years ago when she was diagnosed with depression and bi-polar disorder. “I’ve struggled with depression and bi-polar all my life…and with my ADHD I never succeeded at school or what I was doing, so I found that doing this art, all of a sudden I didn’t need to do the same things I’d been doing, struggling to….get my mental health in balance, I was finding a way through my art to get that balance.”

Oddly this balance comes through in her creation and onto the canvas in contrasting colors that set the girls off from the page like blue magical flames that whisper alluring secrets. The eyes are deep and full, contrasting with the girls’ pale skin, which in turn contrasts with the bold blocks of color in the background.

The girls all have well-designed hair. Thykeson’s cosmetology background reveals itself through the different hairstyles of each of her girls. The hair sometimes waves, sometimes sits, and sometimes is frizzy, the tiny words from the pages from which she took her hair only visible upon closer inspection. The hair, and to some extent the girls, seems to sit on top of the background, as if the commotion of the colors cannot touch the pale quietness of the girls.

If Thykeson has done anything well, it is mastering the idea of contrasting colors to bring the viewer into the art. It’s as if she took the extremes of her mental illness and funneled into her ability to create lively contrasts. Although Thykeson said that this issue informs her art, when the time to actually create a piece arises, it is music that propels her inner self onto the canvas.

“Music inspires my art. Different musicians, different bands, different styles of music, I’m a visual learner but I need that audio…when I’m doing my art there’s certain music, and it shows in my art, you can tell if I am listening to happy music or sad music or metal, whatever I’m listening to shows up in my art.”

Thykeson is an artist by passion and a cosmetologist by profession and has happily found a way to balance her life, “This is what I’ve found that really centers me and brings me down to earth and has brought me success in the first time in my life.”

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Facebook: Kristine Thykeson Creations