In The Studio With Tyler Kay

From a Chappell Hill “shudio” to walls several stories high, artist Tyler Kay is making Texas her canvas. Her work has taken her from community murals to Miranda Lambert’s Big Loud Texas, but the thread running through it all is remarkably personal: place, memory and the belief that art should meet people where they already are.

There is a disco ball hanging in the middle of Tyler Kay’s studio. Technically, she calls it her “shudio.”

The 1,500 square foot shop and studio sits in Chappell Hill, Texas, with three large roll up bay doors that open to the countryside. There is a wood burning stove for winter, a view of the neighbor’s horses and, occasionally, a chicken that decides to wander inside.

“It’s very much a Texas shop turned artist studio. It isn’t air-conditioned, so when those doors are open, the outside comes in with me. I get the breeze, the view of my neighbor’s horses, and occasionally one of their chickens actually wanders in. I joke that the spiders and bugs are my studio mates at this point.”

Then again, defining Tyler’s studio by four walls misses the point entirely. When catching up with Tyler for this piece, she was sitting beside the Imperial Sugar silos in Sugar Land, working on a mural.

“If I’m outside making public art, I consider that my studio too. Sometimes it’s a wall in the middle of a city, sometimes it’s the side of a building, sometimes I’m on a lift several stories in the air. My surroundings are constantly changing depending on the project.”

For Tyler, wherever she is creating becomes the studio.

“That’s also where my glitch florals came from, taking something organic and familiar and interrupting it with something that feels digital and contemporary. I love taking something we all recognize and changing the scale or breaking the image apart just enough that you experience it differently.”

Her relationship with art, however, did not begin inside galleries. Tyler had never stepped foot inside one until she was 20.

“I grew up loving art and making things, but I didn’t grow up understanding the art world or really knowing that being a working artist could be a career.”

The University of Houston changed that. Tyler eventually earned her Master’s in Arts Leadership and became increasingly interested in what art could accomplish beyond traditional art spaces. Her graduate practicum took her to Greece, where she partnered with a nonprofit art organization and led five community engaged murals.

The experience shifted something.

“I wasn’t just interested in what ended up on the wall. I was interested in what happened when people were invited into the process of creating it.”

Perhaps the fact that galleries once felt like another world is precisely why Tyler’s work now occupies spaces where no invitation is required.

It's a lot more problem solving with everything from masonry, what primer to use, access to lifts, scaffolding, projectors, keeping an eye on weather patterns, sealant, and more. Public art has required Tyler to become fluent in subjects she never expected to encounter when she decided to become an artist.

“A ridiculous amount of it is problem solving.” Her philosophy is considerably simpler, because "Everything is figureoutable.”

That willingness to figure it out might explain why a canvas can be ten inches or a wall can be several stories tall and both still feel distinctly Tyler Kay.

Long before Junk Gypsy commissioned Tyler to create a painting for the Rose Room inside Miranda Lambert’s Big Loud Texas, Tyler was a little girl wandering Warrenton with her Meme.

“I grew up going to Warrenton with my Meme to antique. We’d get there and I’d basically be told, ‘Stay on this side of the road, don’t go past the creek, and meet me back at the funnel cakes at this time.’ And off I’d go.”

She knew exactly where she was headed.

“I knew exactly what I was looking for: the colorful, sparkly Junk Gypsy tent. I would basically go loiter in there. I’d never been inside a space surrounded by that much color, sparkle, and creative props. I didn’t even know what to think of it. I just wanted to look at everything.”

Years later, the people behind that tent came looking for her. Junk Gypsy commissioned Tyler to create a canvas for the Rose Room inside Miranda Lambert’s Big Loud Texas in Austin.

“So years later, having Junk Gypsy reach out to me as an artist and commission a painting for a space they were designing was really special. And then for that painting to be for the Rose Room inside Miranda Lambert’s Big Loud Texas made it feel even more full circle.”

Junk Gypsy provided the bones. Tyler took it from there,

“They provided the original black-and-white graphic of the woman and the text that became the central figure of the painting. They also sent me images of the blank wall and mantle, the lighting fixtures and furnishings, and a link to the wallpaper that would eventually surround the piece. So I had a really good sense of the room they were creating and the world this painting needed to live in.”

Tyler developed the palette and incorporated the actual Miranda Lambert rose from the Tyler Rose Garden, repeating its vibrant pink throughout the painting and moving the roses through the woman’s blouse.

Subtle glitch elements made the piece unmistakably her own.

“I really enjoy this kind of work. Give me the bones of a space and an idea of how you want it to feel, and I love figuring out how to make the artwork belong there while still making it distinctly mine.”

Knowing what might happen in that room gives the finished work another layer.

“There’s something especially cool about knowing songs might be written, meetings held and careers shaped in a room where something I painted is living in the background.”

Instead, Tyler listens.

“What did they love? What made them laugh? What did their family immediately associate with them? What colors, places, objects or tiny details feel like that person?”

For Virginia Hollis, one of those details was music.

“The piano keys that move throughout the painting are my favorite example. Virginia played piano and had even composed her own song. I think there’s something incredibly special about a girl her age already experimenting with putting her own melodies together and creating something that was entirely hers.”

The keys became more than an illustration of something Virginia loved.

“So the piano isn’t just there to show that she played an instrument. I wanted the keys to become part of the movement of the painting and represent that creative part of her, the fact that she wasn’t only learning music, she was already creating it.”

Tyler understands something about the way loss can divide a life into before and after.

During her freshman year of college, her boyfriend passed away. The loss changed the direction of her own life.

“It was actually during that time that I changed my major to art and decided I was going to go after what I really wanted to do. Life suddenly felt very short, and I understood at a young age that there are no guarantees that you’ll get around to doing something ‘someday.’”

She has a name for what followed. Mortality Motivation.

“It sounds dark, but I don’t mean it that way. For me, it’s the opposite. It’s an awareness that I’m here, I have this life right now, and I want to actually participate in it. Make the thing. Go somewhere. Love people well. Take the chance. Go after the dream.”

That experience does not make someone else’s grief hers. It does shape the care with which she approaches it.

“Their grief isn’t mine, and I would never pretend to understand exactly what another family is experiencing. But I do understand what it feels like to lose someone you love and have that loss permanently change the direction of your life.”

For Tyler, one of the greatest compliments a public artwork can receive has very little to do with aesthetics.

“One of the greatest reactions to a public work isn’t necessarily, ‘That’s beautiful.’”

“It’s when someone looks at it and says, ‘That’s us.’”

That happened in a deeply personal way with her mural for Potter’s Western Store in Columbus, Texas. Mr. Potter Sr. had passed away the previous year. The mural became, in part, a tribute to him and the legacy of the store. On the morning of the ribbon cutting, the man who had mowed the field there for years approached Tyler.

“He had known Mr. Potter, and he just started crying. He kept telling me he couldn’t believe it, he couldn’t believe the mural and what I had created. Then, of course, he had me crying too.”

Those reactions stay with her.

“By the time I actually put paint on the wall, I’m incredibly invested. I really do put everything I have into these projects. So when someone who has a personal connection to the story sees the finished piece and has a reaction like that, it means more to me than they probably realize.”

Sometimes Tyler is not the only one holding a paintbrush. Her community engaged projects can invite hundreds of people to participate in making the final work. She has learned which brush size to hand someone, how quickly a group can realistically paint and how much of a composition can be completed within a certain amount of time. She has also learned not to panic.

“Especially in those preliminary stages, there’s almost nothing someone can ‘mess up.’ I can freehand back over something, redraw a line, correct a brushstroke or paint over an area. Everything can be fixed.”

What happens next is worth considerably more than a perfect brushstroke.

“You see a child paint a section and immediately grab their parent to show them, ‘I painted that.’ Now they have a connection to that artwork that they wouldn’t have had if they’d only watched me make it.”

“I can fix a brushstroke. What I can’t manufacture is that feeling of ownership and connection.”

The finished mural becomes something different.

“The mural becomes part artwork and part record of an experience.”

For someone who works at monumental scale, some of Tyler’s most meaningful art hangs quietly at home.

She collects art, signs and the kinds of oddities one finds while antiquing without necessarily knowing where they will go.

“I like my home to feel collected over time rather than perfectly designed all at once. And I’m definitely guilty of buying something with absolutely no idea where I’m going to put it, just because I know I’ll regret leaving it behind.”

There is one collection she would never sell. Her Great Aunt Geneva’s oil paintings.

“She was my grandpa’s sister and an oil painter, and she passed away from cancer when I was really young. She left behind all of her paintings, and I’m fortunate to have many of them in my home now.”

Tyler studies them closely.

“I love looking at them really closely and analyzing her brushstrokes, seeing the decisions she made and almost trying to understand how she painted through the marks she left behind.” There is an imagined relationship within those brushstrokes too.

“I think what makes them especially meaningful to me is imagining a world where she had lived longer and we could have painted together. I never really got to know her artist-to-artist, so in a way, her paintings are how I get to do that now.”

Perhaps that is also why Tyler understands what it means when someone chooses one of her paintings for their own home.

“As artists, we have the ability to create, but our time is still finite. There are only so many paintings I can physically make in a year, and ultimately only so many I’ll make in my lifetime. So every time someone chooses to bring one of those pieces into their home, that means something to me.”

The relationship between artist and collector becomes its own kind of exchange.

“On the other side of that is an artist who spent a portion of their life making something that now gets to become part of yours.”

Round Top occupies an unusual place in Tyler’s story.

She experienced it first as a little girl antiquing with her Meme. Today, she returns as an artist herself.

“I honestly feel more connected to the creators I meet in Round Top than I have in almost any other creative community.”

Part of that connection comes from the difficulty of putting her own practice neatly into a box.

“I might be painting a canvas one month, a building the next, working with a community, or figuring out how to fabricate something I’ve never made before. So I really enjoy being around people whose creativity takes all kinds of different forms.”

Round Top gives those people a place to collide.

“Round Top brings together artists, artisans, designers, makers and entrepreneurs, so many of them women, who are building businesses around what they know how to make and create. I find that incredibly inspiring. It feels less like everyone has to fit into one definition of what a creative career is supposed to look like.”

During show season, Tyler deliberately tries not to schedule projects, because she wants to be here.

“I want to walk around, meet vendors, talk to other creators and see what everyone is making and building.”

Perhaps one day that relationship will become even more permanent.

“Maybe one day I’ll have a booth or a storefront of my own. Never say never.”

For now, you can find her painting in her "shudio" in Chappell Hill with large and small works spread across Texas and beyond.

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