Lucy Hunnicutt’s words

Self-taught painter Lucy Hunnicutt is profiled by Arnold Wengrow in the Asheville Citizen-Times. “Hunnicutt’s house had a wood stove. ‘It was a real cold winter,’ she said. “People think Florida doesn’t get cold, but you know it does.’ One night when she was feeding some scraps of cypress wood into the stove, she had a sudden thought, ‘I could paint on this wood.’ Using leftover house paint, she painted a dream from the night before. “It was white birds that turned into angels,” she said, and she wrote on the finished painting, ‘My dream.’ Hunnicutt painted other dreams and memories on scraps of wood but then fed them into the fire until a friend saw some and asked to hang them in his barn. A Florida gift shop owner saw them there and bought them. She soon visited Hunnicutt for more….Hunnicutt is currently making ‘word paintings,’ in which strings of vividly colored text meander across the canvas. ‘I’ve realized lately that I’m always telling stories to myself,’ she said. ‘I start the letters, and each letter becomes a little abstract painting.'” Read more.