Erica-Lynn Huberty Defines Style After Injury

For the past three years, artist and novelist Erica-Lynn Huberty has incorporated textiles, painting and needlepoint to produce an exciting body of mixed-media work.

The small and whimsical pieces contain floral motifs, human figures and various species of wildlife that hint at a greater narrative, but Huberty’s visual story was almost never told.

In 2005, the Bridgehampton painter was in a car accident that severely injured her hand and nearly ended her artistic career. Huberty painted large-scale oils, and the work became impossible after her injury. Discouraged and in pain, Huberty quit painting, took up interior design and didn’t look back for nearly four long, fallow years.

“One day I picked up a little brush,” Huberty said, recalling her return to fine art. She could never be the physical painter she once was, but Huberty found a new, more manageable direction. She could handle the smaller fabric pieces, needle and thread, and the lightweight brushes without difficulty, so Huberty returned to the studio and began creating the work that defines her today.

Huberty said her work is more thoughtful than the stream of consciousness paintings she did before the accident. “There’s a lot of plotting and planning that goes into each piece,” she said, explaining that she maps out her work and completes it in a three- or four-step process of textiles, small brushwork, embroidery and decoupage.

While her works could be called collage or mixed media, Huberty said she prefers to call them paintings. “A posture of drawing with either paint or thread is assumed, the mediums overlapping as if done simultaneously,” Huberty explains in her artist statement.

Combining all her materials requires a level of technical skill, and Huberty plans her pieces carefully to avoid puckering, sewing issues and damage to the finer antique fabrics, but the content of her work is created a bit more organically. “I’m a big animal lover and a lover of nature,” Huberty said, describing her inspiration.

Each painting has a theme and a narrative, some more clear than others. “I’m not an abstract artist at all,” she said, noting that telling a story is important. Huberty collects huge amounts of textiles, and the images and patterns on the fabric often inspire or direct her scenes.

She noted that the characters in a piece titled Explorers of the New Century were cut out of a Victorian toile pattern. One man appears to be spear fishing, another is walking a goat and the third is lying in the grass with two women. Huberty said she found the “happy-go-lucky” and “deviously sexual” figures to be hilarious contrasted against the large wild cat she painted into the piece by hand.

“The narrative kept changing,” she said, noting that her story might shift if the composition demands additional material.

Along with the symbolism of nature and botanicals in particular, Huberty said she is inspired by the human need to hoard and collect, religion, the role of women over the last three centuries, superstition and the Victorian era and its consumerist society. She graduated from New York University and received Master of Fine Arts and Masters in Literature from Bennington College in Vermont before marrying her husband Alex and moving to the East End full time in 1996. Huberty and her husband have two children, 9-year-old Liam and 3-year-old Beatrix.

Huberty published a book of short stories called Dog Boy and Other Harrowing Tales in 2010, and The Birding Life: A Passion for Birds at Home and Afield by Laurence Sheehan features her work. She was recently picked up by the William Morris Agency and two more novels are in the works.

To see more of Erica-Lynn Huberty’s art or read about her writing, visit www.EricaLynnHuberty.com. Huberty's work can also be seen at the in Bridgehampton and Denise Bibro Fine Art in Manhattan.