A LIFE IN COLOR AND LINES

From childhood sketches to global travels and gallery walls, artist Erin Kaya finds peace and purpose in geometric shapes and vibrant hues.

Asking Erin Kaya why she got into art is like asking why the sky is blue? “I don’t know what made me start drawing because it was just something I always did,” says the Northbrook-based painter. “Growing up I remember colors. What I wore, what color the monkey bars were, the color of everyone’s houses. And all I did was draw. I filled sketchbook after sketchbook using charcoal, marker, and crayons.”

Kaya’s creative impulse has never diminished. Even when real life led her to a career in fashion. After earning a BFA from theUniversity of Kansas, she became a manager for Barrington-born designer Cynthia Rowley. “The clothes and the fashion shows were my inspiration,” Kaya recalls. “I began painting the colors of the season as they came from the runway. I hung my paintings in the windows and did the same when I went on to lead the visual merchandising department at Marshall Field’s. People would always say, ‘You are so talented, why don’t you paint full-time?”’

That’s easier said than done, of course. And what’s meant to be, will be—in time. Kaya began painting full-time in 2009 after her daughter was born; she wanted her child to understand that she could do whatever she might wish to do. But before that came a stretch of world travel, which included teaching art to children in Tanzania. “Those kids wanted nothing but my attention and they changed the way I see the world,” shares Kaya. “Returning to the North Shore after Africa was difficult at first. I remember standing in the aisle at Sunset, wanting to buy mineral water. There were 25 different bottles, and I had just been in a place where people have no shoes.”

Once she embraced painting as a career, her works began popping up in restaurants, boutiques, hotels, bars, libraries, and even Starbucks. She developed relationships with interior design firms, and Golub Capital commissioned work for both their Chicago and New York offices. From 2016 to 2020, she was represented by Chicago’s Thomas Masters Gallery. Today, she exhibits her work at Vivid Art Gallery in Winnetka, has a line of wallpaper with Area Environments, and sells canvas prints through HomeGoods. Currently having a solo show at Mark Rengers

Gallery outside Pittsburgh, Kaya connects regularly with local nonprofits and charities like Erika’s Lighthouse, an organization that provides free mental health programming to schools, to which she donates a painting a year for fundraising purposes.

Highly personal (she refers to her work as “a peek into my soul”), Kaya’s canvases are large and dynamic. There’s no missing them in a room. A dense framework of intersecting lines and blocks of color, they seem to pulse and vibrate; one moment all surface, the next moment all depth. “I paint lines and squares. No circles. I want precise straight lines, but only when you look from afar. Up close, I want my lines and squares to be a bit messy and unorganized. Painting geometrical shapes and patterns has a calming effect, letting my mind relax. I get rid of all the outside noise and am just in the moment. I always feel that my best paintings are the ones I don’t remember painting because I was someplace else.”

For more information,visit artbyerinkaya.com.