"Street Fest," a triptych by Miranda Vavrosky at Art on the Bend (photo by Jonathan Turner).
Miranda Skye Vavrosky knows art can help save lives, because it saved hers.
The open, compassionate, unpretentious Vavrosky is the newest artist to have a month-long exhibit at Art on the Bend. The gallery is in the event space between The Rust Belt and Midwest Ale Works on East Moline’s 12th Avenue, which rotates artists each month. Vavrosky will post on her Facebook and Instagram when she will be painting in the space.
There will be a public reception at Art on the Bend on Friday, September 20, from 6 to 9 p.m., with the artist present and food from Little Brown Box Delicatessen.
Her paintings represent an eclectic variety of styles and materials, mostly in the abstract genre.
“I put on music and I channel what I feel,” said the 34-year-old, Moline-based Vavrosky. “I sort of go into a meditative state, a trance-like state. I try not to overthink it.”
One of the 17 works on display is titled Primordial Pulse, a collaborative painting Vavrosky did with her longtime friend K.T. Sides, who normally does very realistic art.
“For me, I like to just paint, turn off my brain,” Vavrosky said, noting that was hard for Sides. “You can’t control it, you just have to do it.”
They worked together for a month on the new piece. “I’m so happy that one is up in a public space,” Vavrosky said, "because that one also has not been seen by the public.”
Art to Vavrosky is instinctual and improvisational, “a medium of salvation, a lifeline that emerged during a dark period of suffering,” she wrote in her artist statement. “It became my sanctuary, a refuge from the storms within that my health waged against me. My work reflects this transformative journey, a dance with the emotions that helped me cope.
“Inspired by visionaries like Pollock, Krasner, and others, I've forged a unique style that merges action painting with my intuition and trance-like states of mind. My canvases explode with vivid colors, dynamic shapes, and traces of life's profound stories,” she wrote.
Vavrosky originally embarked on a medical career path in college, but health hurdles derailed her course. She planned to be a physical-therapy assistant, and attended Scott Community and Black Hawk Colleges. Vavrosky wrestled with narcolepsy, anxiety, and depression. She went through a process of accepting her body’s limitations.
“Why can’t I keep up with my friends who are my age?” Vavrosky recalled. “I went through a big feeling-sorry-for-myself stage. When I found art, I alchemized those feelings onto the canvas, so they were no longer inside of me.”
“Energy can be transferred but it can’t be destroyed,” she added. “Anything that is inside of me that was making my illness worse, I was able to put that on my canvas.”
She wants her art to help give people hope and make them not feel so alone.
“They’re not the only person going through the depression and anxiety,” Vavrosky said. “When you’re in it, it doesn’t feel that way. It feels like you’re the only one and nobody else understands, when you’re in that mind frame with mental health.”
“I think every roadblock re-routes us, and gives us the detour we needed to find our actual path, our actual purpose in life,” she said. “I knew I wanted to help people. I knew I wanted to help people not feel so alone in their struggles.”
After high school at Geneseo and Rockridge, Vavrosky started pursuing art seriously in college, and felt behind her fellow students.
“I hadn’t had the professional technical training,” she said. “So I felt very inadequate. My college professor said to me, when Johnny Cash went to a voice trainer to control his voice, she said she wouldn’t train him because she didn’t want to change his sound.”
Vavrosky’s art professor said no one can teach what she had, or what she could do.
“I never thought I was an artist until she said I was an artist,” she recalled, noting art makes people feel, and look deeper within themselves.
“Art is like a mirror and it’s reflecting back to you something in your subconscious,” Vavrosky said.
“My techniques are distinctive: I paint upside down, dance while I create, and surrender to the rhythm of intuition,” her artist statement says. “My process is a form of meditation, where I transmute my energy into every stroke. Reminding myself to play and be a tool for the artwork to create itself.”
Art on the Move
One of Vavrosky’s goals is to get an old bus to turn into a traveling studio.
“I’ve painted in my apartment, I’ve painted in my studio,” she said. “I’ve gone out into the country and the mindset I can get into when I’m in the country and there’s silence. I feel I pick up a different energy when I’m painting. I would really love to travel and go to different national parks and areas, and paint with that energy and that landscape in front of me.”
She also wants to work with children facing health challenges to let them express themselves through art.
“I want to work with people who have disabilities, with children who are going through a really big, life-changing struggle,” Vavrosky said, also noting that paintings don’t have to be realistic.
“For me, that was so important to learn – I didn’t have to have realism,” Vavrosky said. “I have my own art; I found so many different styles, I didn’t have to stick to painting portraits, or painting abstract expressionism, and I wanted children to realize it’s more about the alchemy of getting the emotions, the energy, the stuff you got stuck inside of you, out, creating that artwork and saying, 'That’s what that is.'”
Vavrosky also doesn’t want to analyze what art means, or be an art therapist. People still can get therapeutic benefits of it by simply creating it.
“People run, they get addicted to running, they get a runner’s high,” she said. “They don’t need a therapist to say, this is how you ran today, this is how you were breathing while you were running. They don’t need someone to do that to get the benefits of releasing those emotions.”
Vavrosky wants to offer a safe space to children to play, to guide them to make their own artwork, and help them deal with what they don’t have words for.
“I’ve always struggled with the right words for things,” Vavrosky said. “Helping children who don’t understand and can’t quite conceptualize their bodies are betraying them. How come they have brain cancer and their siblings don’t? How come they have seizures?
“I want them to see their ability, the strength they have because of this, because of how they’ve overcome this,” she said. “It helps them heal, helps them look forward to their future, instead of getting stuck.”
Vavrosky used artwork to overcome her challenges.
“Little kids have big emotions,” she said. “I think art can help with that and having an art show with children I’ve worked with over the years, that’s where I want to go with that.”
Helping Kids to Heal
Vavrosky envisions using her traveling studio to go to hospitals or community centers, to bring art activities to kids who are getting cancer treatments or who have disabilities.
She organized a fundraiser this past June at the Common Chord Courtyard, to help her five-year-old niece Violet and her young mother Roxy (who’s the only parent and sole provider), with expenses and raise awareness about Violet’s neurological condition.
The girl battles Syngap1 – a rare genetic disorder that causes up to 200 seizures a day – and is autistic and nonverbal. After years of unsuccessful medications, plus regular physical, speech, and occupational therapy, Violet had brain surgery in June at Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, to help reduce her seizures.
Violet’s surgery went well, but her seizures returned. “We’re feeling nervous because she’ll have to go through all that again,” Vavrosky said recently. “Some kids end up having four or five surgeries, but it’s with Mayo Clinic, and they did a great job. They were really wonderful.”
Vavrosky enjoys painting large-scale pieces (some are at The Bend), where sometimes she dances on the canvas while painting. She’s even painted while hanging upside down, after learning aerial yoga.
“I was like, 'Why not hang upside down and do this?'” she said.
Pablo Picasso once said, "It takes a lifetime to learn to paint like a child." With each piece, Vavrosky strives to unveil that childlike wonder in the heart of the observer.
“I’m still experimenting, I’m still playing, still learning,” she said. “There’s still that sense of excitement for me when I splash paint all over a canvas.”
“What I do every time I approach a new canvas is, I start completely fresh,” Vavrosky said. “That’s why my artwork all looks different, because I have that excitement of 'What would have happen if I …?' I have fun experimenting.”
Though she said she may look for future employment as a barista or bartender, Vavrosky has been a full-time artist about four years, following her last job as a cashier.
“I’ve been able to do it,” said Vavrosky, who has been spending her savings, and has begun focusing on working with children and starting her organization “Artsy Aunty.” Art on the Bend is her third art show.
Blending Music and Art
Some of the most eye-catching paintings in East Moline are her only ones with human subjects – a collection of five wildly colorful, almost cartoonish musicians each in ecstatic motion while performing. She said she would prefer to sell the five paintings as a collection as opposed to “breaking up the band,” and Vavrosky personally loves live music and often listens to music while painting.
“I don’t play instruments,” she said, “but when I watch people who are musicians, seeing them shredding the guitar or playing the piano, that is amazing. So I was trying to channel their superhuman musician powers.”
Vavrosky is trying to get her works into Macomb's Spoon River College, to be displayed in their art and architecture program. “I would really like to see them somewhere public, where people can enjoy them,” she said.
Vavrosky was inspired to make the paintings so colorful because of live shows’ lighting effects, also aiming to reflect the musicians’ tremendous energy and life.
The exuberant artist will be painting a donated upright piano for the Sound Conservatory's “Keys of Unity” program this month at The Bend space. It will likely also boast a musician theme. Sound Conservatory owner Andrzej Kozlowski, who plans to have the artist's piano displayed at various locations throughout the community, said he was introduced to Vavrosky by Renew Moline’s Alex Elias. She will be paid for the project.
“I was drawn to the vibrancy and optimistic energy,” he said, “and I just feel we need more of that in society with everything that is going on these days.”
For more information on Miranda Skye Vavrosky and examples of her work, visit VavroskyArt.com.
