Wynn Parks
Artist Katlyn Arnold is from DeFuniak Springs- semi-quaint, Our Town, DeFuniak Springs! So, Katlyn puts a whole different slant on what lurks in the soul of the sedate and semi-quaint.
Not that the artist herself is either quaint or sedate; far from it. She meets me on the grounds near her father’s welding shop. There she’s working on the 8 x 40 foot shipping container into which she’s already installed half-moon windows, a step toward converting it into her new studio.
“Once my land deal is done, I’ll move studio over there and put in the A/C.” Parked next to the nascent studio sits Uniquely Clever’s “Creative Cruiser” a twenty foot box truck already converted into Arnold’s class-room on wheels; decorated outside like a crafts booth from a carnival caravan She shows me around, we talk. “What I did in high school?” She says, “Well, I remember one thing was artsy, hands-on processes like papier mâché, ceramics. Close second was boys!
Arnold graduated from Troy State, and went straight to Walton Middle School where she designed and taught sixth through eighth grade the school’s first art course.
But, after three middle-school years, she blew-off being “Hey-Miss-Arnold!” to dive off the deep end and start her own art business.
“I think I might be a little ADHD!” Arnold smiles, adding, “Well, that’s my professional, self-diagnosis… I’m lucky to have a wide range of knowledge in different art forms!” Finally she says, ” I love jumping from drawing, to painting on windows, or sometimes people!”
Yet, as much promise as Katlyn’s creative art work might display, her sense of enterprise is as over-the-top as it is intuitive. When “the Man” says, “If it don’t move paint it!”, the “Man” is being prissy compared to Arnold. So it’s no great surprise to later discover, she will paint it even if it does move. As a consequence of Katlyn’s dive off the deep end, she might just as well have thrown herself into a two-ring art circus with prospects of soon adding a third!
Uniquely Clever would be “Ring One”-“Art classes, parties, camp events for kids and adults, for all occasions.” and at a tasteful distance below, “Artworks from the artist are for sale; or work for commission.” Whatever else goes on in the first ring, its most anticipated feature is its “gypsy” art studios. The original, a thirty-eight foot ex-school bus called “Imagination Machine”, was a bigger class-room than the new “Creative Cruiser”, only I.M was harder on gas over its 90+ mile range, and too awkward for in-town navigation: visiting elementary school classrooms, private parties, etc. But with either size, OMG!, to have a work-play adventure, doing art in some kind of willy-wonka studio that rolls up out of nowhere and afterwards disappears once more? How can Arnold’s seductive admixture of art appreciation classes and social happenings not recall a page from DeFuniak’s Chautauqua past?
Au Naturel, Center-Ring-to-be, is where, for Arnold, it gets serious. Self-expression being a kid’s main gig, for the pre-pubescent, in freewheeling gypsy-bus-studios, doing art elbow, to smudged elbow, life looks like a bowl of cherries. On the other hand, Arnold’s adult programs happily include a studio session called “Paint and Sip”; that is, BYOB seminars celebrating fine arts and wine simultaneously. Hemingway did say to write drunk and edit sober …
Katlyn’s taste in modern painting is gourmet; includes the sensual imagery of Georgia O’Keeffe on one hand, and the acrylic bas reliefs of Emerald Coast painter Justin Gaffery, on the other. Katlyn paints with acrylic too, but is simultaneously experimenting with oil paints as well. In ’21, her chalk-work was a Merit Winner in the South Walton Street Art Festival, Her products range from bright murals on trucks, walls and store-front windows, to moody, drawings of stark, monochrome nudes, not to mention the occasional mature-viewer-only drawings. Her early fascination with the spectrum of mediums and techniques has lately evolved into experimenting with “Found” art pieces from the “re-purposed” objects of everyday life, mixed perhaps with disparate materials like acrylics and clay.
Sometimes, painting things that move includes the human body. Katlyn does it, from face to toe; with a tight schedule around, Halloween, so haunted by mini-me Draculas, and green faced Fionas.
For one mom-to-be with a sense of humor, Katlyn made a house-call to body-paint a huge watermelon over her rather substantial baby-bump.
“Don’t know where she wore it outside the house,” Katlyn says, “but she wanted me to take a picture of that watermelon to show her new baby, when baby’s old enough!”
And in Ring Number Three, Arnold aims to start an organization for art-minded women.
“I want to teach ‘the sisters’”, She muses, “the best way to stretch a canvas, or how to use a circular saw. I want to teach the things you need to know to be self-sufficient at art work.”
That’s seriously taking Katlyn Arnold in the direction of becoming an art polymath. Meanwhile, house, Paint-party anyone? … greatest show on Earth?,
