Flight of Fancy

Fueled by a vivid imagination and bucketful of talent, Corinna Luyken is an artist on the rise.

My Marc Covert

Corinna Luyken ’00 begins her workday like many of us—rising early, sitting down to a fresh cup of coffee or tea (brewed by husband MacLeod Pappidas), maybe doing some exercise like yoga or going for a swim, and then getting down to business by eight or nine. But there the similarity ends.  After all, how many of us can say we go to our jobs each day and create magic? Even Luyken may hesitate to call it that, but there may be no better word to describe what she does. 

Photograph by MacLeod Pappidas

Her workspace is small but orderly, clutter kept to a minimum, nestled between the kitchen and living room in a small rental house in Aberdeen, Washington. While jazz plays softly in the background, Luyken sits at her drawing table, sharing a chair with her big, brown and gray tabby, Buster, when she takes up a pencil and begins to sketch. Inspiration may or may not come right away; holding to regular hours and trying to keep the critical part of her mind in check often lead to what she calls “happy surprises” in her work. A lifelong yoga and aikido devotee, she focuses on the here-and-now, moment-to-moment act of creating. She may spend hours on end in this one place, switching back and forth from pencil to ink to watercolors. Soon an image emerges: a woman cradling huge, glowing snowflakes, a man with abstract musical notes snaking from a giant orange trumpet—it could be any number of things. Her imagery seems to take flight, wild motions and graceful movements all tumble and whirl together, spilling out onto the paper—by proxy, if you will. Luyken may be sitting still, fully enraptured by the creative process, but her paintings display the heart and dexterity of a dancer.

Many of these paintings will grace her ever-expanding line of greeting cards, which never fail to stop people in their tracks with her depictions of women, men, children, animals, and nature, all celebrating life in a world playfully off-kilter from our own. “This whole business has been evolving as I go,” she says. “Greeting cards aren’t really what I thought I would be doing now—I always wanted to do illustrations for children’s books, and I’d still like to do that some day—but I’ve found that I really love making these cards. I’m thrilled by the idea that people send my art along to friends and family with their thoughts of love, gratitude, and friendship. And I never know where the cards will end up; once people buy them, they can be sent anywhere in the world. It’s like art with wings!”

One unintended benefit of art with wings: several years ago a set designer in Hollywood saw Luyken’s cards and commissioned five original watercolors for the set of Baby Mama, starring Tina Fey and Amy Poehler. Those who recognize Luyken’s work can clearly see her painting, In the Language of Butterflies, to the left of the bathroom door in the movie trailer. “It was really fun to watch the movie and see if I could spot the paintings,” she laughs. “But Hollywood isn’t breaking down my door just yet.”

Born in the San Francisco Bay Area and raised in Oregon, Luyken can’t remember a time when she didn’t want to draw, and her infatuation with color began at an early age. “I’ve always remembered the world in colors,” she says. “Even as a child I would remember people by the colors they wore, or places like Arizona by the red-rock landscapes.” As a young girl, her influences included syndicated comics like Garfield and standard kids’ fare like Dr. Seuss. As her artistic talents matured, she gained inspiration from poets, illustrators, and painters like Yehuda Amichai, Lisbeth Zwerger, and John James Audubon. “Oh, and Bob Ross!” she remembers, almost as a guilty pleasure. “He’s the painter with the beard and big Afro on public television. He’d always talk about painting ‘big fluffy clouds.’ I learned a lot from him about how art can be fun.”

At Middlebury, Luyken put aside her paints and drawing pads for a time to concentrate on new pursuits; she majored in dance and minored in religion. But it wasn’t long before she devised ways to integrate her love of art into a course of study that combined heavy doses of dance with ecology, printmaking, and writing. Her senior thesis, remembers dance teacher Penny Campbell nine years later, “included photographs and drawings, poems she wrote in a lovely little edition to give out, and a short group-movement piece rooted in improvisational dance.” Other teachers were equally impressed. Former Middlebury creative writing instructor Barbara Ganley says, “Corinna Luyken was one of the standout creative students in all my 19 years at Middlebury. She found ways to weave gorgeous prints and drawings into her writing at a time when her peers were focused on one medium or the other. She was following her own creative instincts, a Blake in our midst.”

After graduation Luyken returned to the Pacific Northwest, eventually settling in Washington’s Methow Valley, where she took up painting and printmaking in earnest. She sold her first greeting cards there in 2004 and 2005, and began to market them outside her local region in 2006. The first bookstore to carry her cards was in Alaska; soon she had clients in Colorado, Utah, California, Washington, D.C., and New Hampshire.

After searching for a distributor to take the day-to-day marketing work off her plate (“my studio was beginning to look more like an office than an art space”), Luyken signed on in 2008 with Emery-Burton, a wholesale distributor that now ships her cards to boutiques, bookstores, gift shops, and natural foods stores throughout the United States and Canada. Central to Luyken’s entrepreneurial philosophy is an absolute commitment to environmental sustainability and social responsibility—all of her cards are printed on recycled paper using soy-based ink, and a percentage of her profits is donated to organizations whose missions embrace peace, education, and social justice.

As for what the future may hold, Luyken and Pappidas plan to move to Hoquiam, just a few miles to the north. A new home studio awaits them, larger and brighter and more open, along with space for a vegetable garden and prowling territory for Buster. She and Pappidas hope to stay put, but are open to going where life takes them. For now, they both want to seek out other local artists (Pappidas is a newspaper photographer), something they have had little time to do since arriving in southwest Washington.

“The art scene around here is pretty tiny,” she says, “but over in Hoquiam, they are starting an artists’ cooperative gallery, and we’ve gotten to know a few artists who do sculpture, design work, and collage fabric pieces.” Even in times of change and uncertainty on a personal, local, and global level, Luyken’s art helps her maintain her positive outlook. “Whether it’s music, dance, or visual art, I think that beauty of any kind can work wonders on the mind, body, and spirit. And the great thing about art is that under the right circumstances, it can uplift not just individuals, but whole communities.”