THE OPPOSITE OF DARKNESS

THE OPPOSITE OF DARKNESS
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Why does this story matter? Because of the feeling. Because of the love. Because Carolyn Hall Young embodies the opposite of darkness, and because you never know what you’ll get to be grateful for.

https://www.gofundme.com/friendsofcarolyn

I want to tell you about one extraordinary human being. She’s the artist Carolyn Hall Young. Here’s why you need to know about her.

When most artists talk about negative space, they’re referring to the ground around the figure, the air around the object, the surrounding darkness that defines light. For Carolyn, however, negative space also describes the unpredictable bounty of life.

Carolyn Hall Young is a painter and graphic designer. She’s a pioneer in the fields of mobile digital art and car audio design. She is a survivor whose secret powers consist of love, beauty, and joy. And she is the connective force linking virtual communities of friends and innovators in technology, medicine, art, and education around the globe. Some describe her as a miracle worker. Others think of her simply as a miracle of humanity.

For nearly thirty years – half her life ― Carolyn has been living with stage-four non-Hodgkin lymphoma – emphasis on living. Soon after she was first diagnosed, she and her husband, Warren, moved to a little town outside of Santa Fe, where they bought a four-acre ranch, rebuilt a dilapidated 160-year-old adobe farmhouse, planted gardens and transformed their life to include four horses, cats, dogs, and a rural community that bore no resemblance either to the urban culture they’d left behind in Phoenix or to Greenwich, Connecticut, where Carolyn grew up.

Most of this transformation they accomplished with their own hands, aided by their neighbors. And today the walls are crowded with paintings that reflect this remade life. A coffee cup beams with light in one of Carolyn’s canvasses. Her late white steed Terbay grazes in another. Three pears glow in a pottery plate, and serape-draped chairs under the New Mexican sky fill several panels. The presence of the woman who filled the cup, nurtured (and was nurtured by) the horse, grew the pears, and occupied those chairs is as palpable as the hand, eye, and heart that created these paintings. That’s another dimension of negative space.

“You never know what you’ll get to be grateful for,” Carolyn will say. This statement draws on her gift for transforming accidents on paper or canvas into elements of beauty. It also reflects her gratitude for the failure of a first marriage that left her free to find Warren, who shares her life to this day. And it has come to describe multiple rounds of high-dose chemo and any number of other treatments, experiments, and ordeals that have caused indescribable suffering and helped her stay alive.

“You never know,” Carolyn repeats. “That moment may be horrible, but you’ve got to give thanks first and ask questions later.” Not that this is easy. Negative space doesn’t stop being negative when it’s transformed; it just becomes positive in equal or greater measures.

In 2001 Carolyn told a reporter who was writing an article about her for the local paper, “I tend my garden, and it nourishes me.” When in bloom this garden is a profusion of flox, hollyhocks, campanula, iris, roses, delphinium, lilies, and lavender, plus herbs and dozens of varieties of heirloom tomatoes. It flows around boulders that Carolyn moved into place with her own under-90-pound grit. The result is planned but open to the unexpected, exuberant with a backbone of quiet gray toughness. Changing constantly from season to season, its messy and uncertain grace is a living reminder that you never know what you’ll get to be grateful for.

For almost as long as she’s lived with cancer Carolyn has peer counseled other seriously ill patients. Many of them don’t make it. “And when someone dies,” she says, “I want to throw myself on the floor and wail. I want to scream and swear.” Sometimes she does just that, but then she turns to her box of rubber blocks and starts carving four-letter words backwards and reversed, preparing to turn negative space into positive imprints of love. LOVE is one of those four-letter words, along with HOPE, GOOD, RISK, LIFE, CARE, GIVE, HOLD, and FEEL. Backwards and reversed, the process itself becomes a metaphor for her emotions in grief. But then, as she presses those carved-out ink blocks into the paper, the letters emerge as if formed by light, restored to their desired order and form. And she will send these printed messages of mercy to the families who’ve lost the person they loved. And it helps.

Love always helps. When Carolyn was still able to work, she brought this same spirit to the award-winning car audio systems she designed for Precision Power and Xtant Technologies, from the circuit boards to the painted casings, to all the marketing and advertising materials that promoted her Art Series Amplifiers. Recently she was asked to autograph one of her old car audio banners, and she added the inscription: “Listen for the LOVE of it to the Art of it for the SOUL in it and the FUN of it...Because you know when it’s right. Far from an advertising slogan, Carolyn’s words summed up her philosophy of life.

More recently she’s had to apply this philosophy to art that she can produce without leaving her bed, but – thanks to her trusty iPad Air 2 ― that hasn’t slowed her down. Using a multitude of mobile art tools and apps ― often beta testing them for their creators ― Carolyn has produced more than sixteen hundred iPad portraits as gifts for friends and acquaintances around the globe, many of whom she’s never physically met. Even though she herself can’t travel, her work has flown far, winning awards in mobile digital art competitions from Kansas City to Florence, Italy.

Each of her digital portraits begins with a photograph or two or three, which then take on the texture of collage or the subtlety of oil paint, or the feathery lightness of water color or pastels. Often they incorporate elements of the person’s life that cannot be photographed. The portrait she made for one friend, a writer, included a pigeon and lettering that spelled out the magnanimous phrase, infinite goodness has such wide arms, but also featured two black crows and a telegram from Dorothy Parker to her editor despairing about ever finding the right words. Carolyn is too keen an observer and too honest a friend to leave out the negative aspects of a person’s true nature, but in typical fashion she converts them with love into elements of grace.

A few years ago, while recuperating from one of several excruciating radiation treatments, she was visited by a telephone repairman who, after fixing her phone, revealed that he was wrestling with some difficult life questions of his own. Most people in this situation would have been too preoccupied with their own pain to worry about such questions. Not Carolyn.

“Ask yourself what you want,” she told this stranger. “Most people only want what they think they want. Don’t think. Feel. Whatever you truly feel you want, make that happen.” Feeling is the negative space that turns thinking into love.

Today the global network of love that Carolyn’s work, friendship, and words have inspired is turning to her assistance. Last month her body weakened. She lost the strength to send her usual notes, talk on the phone, or create digital artwork. She began a new round of treatment and, predictably, was soon captivating her doctors and the hospital staff. Meanwhile, her old classmates from Greenwich High School got together virtually with her 1,300 other Facebook friends and in six days raised more than $16,000 from donors all over the world to help cover her medical bills, equipment and care. This is just the beginning.

Why does this story matter? Because of the feeling. Because of the love. Because Carolyn Hall Young embodies the opposite of darkness, and because you never know what you’ll get to be grateful for.

You can join the Friends of Carolyn at https://www.gofundme.com/friendsofcarolyn

See more of Carolyn's art here

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