Aya-Marie Hewlett. Photo:supplied

Aya-Marie's Alice's Portal. Photo:supplied

'The Beanstalk' painting done by Aya-Marie. Photo:supplied

'Bright Smile' by Aya-Marie. Photo:supplied

'Midas Touch' by Aya-Marie. Photo:supplied

She has an effervescent, yet ambitious character, bubbling with ideas and aspirations in a seeming quest to appease an ever growing hunger for learning and mastering new and formidable things.

Her father, Gath Hewlett was also an artist, and she described him as her genesis in many ways. Ms Hewlett started drawing when she was really young and initially did a lot of charcoal and pencil work but started painting in 2006 around the age of 18, adding colour as she experimented with her talents. This was the only real type of consistent training she had ever received, she explained. “He penciled a lot of portrait work and a lot of my first pieces were portraits.”

The young artist took a few classes in high school and college, but never majored in Art. At the time, it was felt that this was mostly really doing what the teacher told her, and this was fine in other subjects, but with artwork, she explained, “you really want it to be coming from yourself so she never really liked art classes that would dictate what you do and ultimately took matters into her own hands one day and started painting and found out that it was more fulfilling.

Although Aya-Marie grew up in the Virgin Islands, much of her youth was spent at various schools in the United States. She started school at St George’s Primary in Road Town and subsequently attended Rumsey Hall School in Connecticut, Lawrenceville School in New Jersey, and Emory University (Goizueta Business School) in Georgia where she studied Business Administration with a concentration in Marketing.

She is also a bit of a sports buff having participated in volleyball, softball, track, field hockey, soccer and tennis. She also has a very big interest in dance and explained that she had done ballet, modern dance and even African dancing to various degrees and at different points during her studies at university and was also interested in teaching this at some point in the future. She saw this as an avenue to cultivate even further interest in the wider field of the arts.

A familiar story emerges when asked whether she pursued art as a full time journey, “I don’t think that I’m going to do one thing my whole life, as far as making it something permanent that I do or will continue to do… yes [it is] but I have other interests. I really like anything creative… anything that I can get my hands on,” she said.

Aya- Marie noted that she has always had a keen interest in education and felt that at some point, her life would steer her down a road that leads to her involvement with educational policies and children.

“I think that art is always going to be there,” she said, “I’m not sure if I’m going to have time to do everything that I want to do in my life and then take painting and art along as a full time job because it is a full time sort of thing if you want to take it seriously and just live off of your work. I just don’t see myself doing that completely.”

Aya-Marie currently works as an Executive Assistant with a Real Estate Company in Manhattan but said she’s not a one track person, “I like teaching, I like Math, I like sports, I like accounting… I’m good at many things and so I don’t want to just pigeon-hole myself into one thing.”

She added that she loved being an artist and felt it wasn’t something she could just change but knowing that she can choose to do other things with her life, she decided to do as many things as she can but not at the expense of the quality of her productivity in each arena. She paints almost every day though, and said that she sees a need to do this in order to have a ‘decent’ turnaround for her artwork. She works in the corporate world during the day and then gets up at nights, around 2 A.M. usually and simply paints for the rest of the morning and goes back to work afterwards.

Style of work

She described her style of painting as very abstract yet bordering on the realm of surrealism at times. “You can see that I’m depicting real, tangible things so it looks like a person and I can do a portrait but that person would be structured in such a way that makes the audience question what [the person] is doing.”

The work, she said, appears to be ‘a moment in a story’ so there was always something going on and there’s always some sort of journey or movement… something that forces the audience to put the picture together themselves.

The multi-talented artist described a painting that she had recently sold as involving a lot of literary research. The painting, based predominantly on the stories of Dante’s Inferno and Alice in Wonderland, was titled ‘Alice’s Portal’.

She loved the "nonsense" that the fairy tale of Alice in Wonderland proposed and combined the two to stories using it to trap the centrepiece of the artwork, falling from a portal to what seems like an inferno below.

She said the piece forces the viewer to think about where the subject is coming from and where it’s going, “just to question it,” she said. “I like to engage an audience, it’s a two-way street… I don’t do art just for it to be looked at as pretty and so if anyone is looking at my work and says ‘oh well this is really pretty’ then you’re not doing the work on your part.” She wants to continue to do work that makes people think about themselves and about their lives and the journeys that they take in life.

Her first love, portraits, will never die though as she explained, “I think that I’ll always be in love with portraits, because it’s the most intimate connection to really make with another human as an artist. You’re trying to portray a personality, not just an image so a portrait is always a very tricky thing too… I think that they’re coming back into my work more now and I’m doing a lot more self-portraits.” She confessed that the latter may be an attempt at trying to figure herself out at this point as a young twenty-five year old.

Of Black women and strength

Describing a recurring theme in her work, Aya-Marie said she primarily paints black women. “Anytime that there’s a person in my paintings… if it’s not completely ambiguous and just an outline, it’s usually a black woman.”

She jokingly said that her work in painting black women might be a hint of narcissism, but quickly added that it was more of a reflection on the canvas of what her role is in the world. “I think that as black women, we’re given… not so many choices, but lots of directions… we’re so strong, we can pretty much do anything,” she related, “I think that I like to have something that I identify as strong in my pieces and using a black woman as that strength that best illustrates the struggles depicted in the work.”

It was also a way of depicting her own struggles, thoughts and ideas in her work and it made sense to her to have someone on canvas that she could most identify with and this was essentially the reason for her choice in black women. “It’s a very particular struggle [that of black women]… not to say that it’s worse or better [than other women], it’s just different and I want to highlight that,” she disclosed.

According to Ms Hewlett, painting a man offered a different connection. It felt as if she would then be painting something through someone else’s mind, using someone else’s body, their movement and their thoughts. Whenever there were no actual women in her pieces, the subjects often took a more amorphous appearance, “I don’t want to always be speaking to and about women… I do feel like my ideas transcend gender,” she added.

Her favourite subjects when not painting the human form were trees and this was visible in many of her pieces. It was something that seemingly rose from her subconscious and struck her belatedly at some point after someone raised the idea. There was also the mysterious insertion of persons hanging from things, such as strings for instance.

She also incorporates foreign objects into her paintings, such as the very strings she spoke about, “If there’s a hole in my canvas, I don’t toss it out,” she said, “I try to incorporate it someway… and I think that I like using thread and needles because I’ve always liked sewing things and thought it would be interesting to incorporate it into my work somehow.”

An artist’s style, she felt, was always constantly evolving and her ideas as a result often resulted in different looking pieces. “I can take one of the ideas and build a collection off of that one idea,” she said, “I don’t think that I am the person that I was two years ago, and I feel my work is a way for me to journalise… so as I change, I think the work changes.”

Advice to youth

Ms Hewlett feels it is necessary to ensure young persons never let anyone tell them that they can’t do something and certainly not let circumstances in life deter them from doing what they want to do and what they love.

Aside from this though, she said it is essential to have a well-rounded background in whatever you want to do. “So I paint, but in the art world you need to know business, so I have a business degree in Marketing. You need a background in art so I study art,” she said.

“It was fundamental to make sure you have 360 [degree] knowledge of whatever industry you want to be in, then you're good to go,” she advised.