After graduating from Lesley University with a master’s degree in art therapy in 2014, Issa van Dyk established a career encouraging others to explore their creativity. Disenchanted with what was offered to them in the mental health field, she and some fellow graduates founded the Lawrence Arts House, which is, according to the website, “an expressive arts open studio which serves as a home for authentic expression and healing.”
“We didn’t want those ‘factory jobs,’” says van Dyk, “where you have too many clients and nobody gets real care.”
The members of the Lawrence Arts Group go out into the community, visiting schools, senior centers, libraries, Boys and Girls Clubs, and more to coordinate art-based projects. “We really wanted to create a different experience of mental health,” explains van Dyk. “We focus on a healing and strength-based approach using expressive therapy as a way of addressing a lot of social and emotional issues, giving people good coping skills.”
When COVID put a halt to van Dyk’s initiatives, she came to the Vineyard and moved into her mother’s house in West Tisbury. The temporary respite from work gave van Dyk the opportunity to pursue her own art for a change. Since last year, the artist has created a number of monoprints, which she exhibited last month during an open house at the studio and gallery on her mother’s property. This weekend, van Dyk will host a second showing of her work.
The series of monotypes is titled “Spiritual Windows.” In each, the artist has used various repeating images, overlapping in a variety of ways to produce a sort of dreamscape. Monoprints are created by a process of transferring paint or ink from a glass plate onto paper by using a press. Van Dyk has templates for images that she tends to use over and over again in her work. These include owls, circles, and a stylized, simple human figure inside a rectangular frame. Using different configurations of these and other elements, van Dyk creates a sort of allegorical image.
“I have this visual vocabulary,” she says. “I have multiple templates that I interplay and interplay, building on various themes.”
Although the artist prefers to let the viewers interpret the images for themselves, van Dyk explains what some of the symbols represent for her. “I see the owl as a creature that brings messages from one realm to the other,” she says. Another recurring image — a circular opening inside of a square — is described as “a gateway to transcendence.” In one untitled print, two gateway images intersect, with a human figure inside the resulting vector. As van Dyk describes that print, “It speaks to me of the worlds that we live between, different realities meshing at the same time — the spiritual and the physical world and the way they interact.”
The monoprint images are complex and full of detail, yet there’s something peaceful, almost spiritual about them.
The artist’s father, James van Dyk, was an artist who was renowned in the contemporary art world during the 1960s. His work is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C. When her father died, van Dyk was inspired to start looking at her own work in a new way. “He was very disgruntled with the art world,” she recalls. “I was 26 when he passed away. It kind of changed the direction of my work as an artist.
“When I came across printmaking, of all of the art I had done, it seemed like the most cohesive,” she adds. “Before I was doing art therapy, I was experiencing it myself.”
Van Dyk describes her printmaking process as intuitive: “The narratives fall into place, as if talking back to me from other realms. Once I was listening to what they were saying to me, it was very healing. It comes from you, but on an unconscious level. The art has a message for you.”
“Spiritual Windows: Monotypes by Issa van Dyk,” a solo exhibition of new work created since March 2020. Saturday and Sunday, Oct. 23 and 24, 11 am to 4 pm, at the Art Barn at 75 Ben Chase Road, West Tisbury.