November 4, 2005

Artists Among Us

Seeing through a glass clearly

Artist Karen Honaker finds the beauty in distorted reflections

By Marilyn Fahey
Staff Writer

It’s not too often an artist gets irked when one of her paintings sells. But that’s what happened when Evergreen artist Karen Honaker heard someone had bought her “Hot Flashes, Spring” the first night of an Allied Artists West show at the Eriksen Gallery in Half Moon Bay.

Artist Karen Honaker works in her studio on another watercolor in her Hot Flashes series. Photo by Carl Honaker

The painting—a watercolor of lilies, irises and daisies arranged in three square glass vases against a floral background of oranges, reds, purples and yellows—had appeared on the marketing material for the show and had attracted a buyer before opening night.

While news of the sale, received via cell phone on her way to the show, should have been occasion for celebration, Honaker wasn’t entirely thrilled. “I hadn’t had time to live with the painting,” she says. “After working so hard on it, I didn’t want to give it up just like that.”

Turns out Honaker feels that way about most of her paintings, which is why the walls of her home—bathed in natural light streaming in from the high-wall windows—display mostly her originals and not prints.

Daphne, a small gray schnauzer, patrols the place, on the alert for anyone who might not duly appreciate the fine work of her mistress. But anyone can see that Honaker’s work should be hung in a gallery. And it is. Just not—in some cases—her originals.

Which is where the process of making “giclées” comes in. A giclée (pronounced “zhee-CLAY) differs from a lithograph in that the colors are brighter, crisper and last longer. To make a giclée of a watercolor, the painting is digitized and the image is imported into a computer. PhotoShop software makes color corrections, and then the piece is printed out on an Iris printer, which applies more than a million droplets of stable watercolor ink onto acid-free watercolor paper.

Winery-inspired paintings
Even vintner Daniel Mirassou couldn’t get Honaker to sell him an original. Honaker, a longtime member of the Mirassou’s tasting club, had suggested to the folks at the winery that they needed some artwork in the place. They agreed with her, and “Red, White or Bleu” became the first in a long line of winery-inspired paintings.

“Red, White or Bleu” — Honaker’s first “winery inspired” painting — features two cobalt blue bottles of Mirassou wine. Photo courtesy of Karen Honaker

The painting he wanted, called “Red, White or Bleu,” had hung in the tasting room at Mirassou’s winery before it closed. The painting features two bottles of Mirassou wine and would have looked perfect, he thought, over his fireplace. Honaker, whose home has the same layout as Mirassou’s, agreed with him. So she hung the original over her fireplace.

“Red, White or Bleu” is a signature Honaker piece—a study of distorted reflections. “For the past 10 years or so,” she says, “I’ve been obsessed with trying to tell the story of looking through glass and showing what’s on the other side.”
The painting is not just a still life of wine glasses and a platter of cheese. The colorful tablecloth, purplish-blue grapes and thick slice of bleu cheese are reflected in the glasses of red and white wines, which are themselves reflected and distorted in the cobalt blue wine bottles behind them.

“See how the pattern of the fabric under the glass is distorted when it’s reflected into the wine,” she’s says, not boasting of her abilities, but rather, sharing her amazement of all the small beauties just waiting to be noticed.

Since she first approached the Mirassou Winery, Honaker’s had plenty of opportunity to revisit the subject of reflection and distortion. She paints for other wineries now as well, including Chalone Wine Group, Chateau St. Julien, Monticello, Zaca Mesa, Tobin James, V. Sattui, Flint Ridge and currently Clos la Chance.

What is her most pressing concern before she takes on this kind of project? “I ask to see the label first. If it’s plain, then it’s no fun.”

High-tech studio
For Honaker, painting is, more than anything, a lesson in problem solving. If a project presents no new problems to be solved, then why take it on at all? As she says, “If you get to the point where you don’t say ‘How am I going to do this?’ then a monkey can do it.”

Maybe so, but there’s not a monkey in the world who’d know what to do with all the equipment Honaker has in her studio. Honaker, who used to write a column about the technical side of fine art for the magazine “Art Calendar,” is no stranger to the high-tech world, and her workspace is no drafty old garret with just a palette and an easel.

Dozens of prize ribbons on the wall frame the doorway in her studio. Aside from her elevated worktable covered with a pencil sketch of another painting in her “Hot Flashes” series, Honaker’s studio looks more like the home of some techno-aficionado. “I’m glad I was born in this era,” she says, surveying her room full of hardware.

Honaker’s paintings become, as she puts it, “an intricate puzzle woven with transparent and intense watercolor pigment.” This watercolor, called Round in Square, was the first she composed using a digital camera. Photo courtesy of Karen Honaker

Digital photography, in particular, has been a big help to Honaker. The first time she composed a piece using a digital camera was a revelation for her. She arranged the objects she had to work with — a purple carafe, yellow pepper teapot, square glass vase full of oranges from Cosentino’s and white jug holding pink lilies all atop a wild-looking tablecloth — then started snapping.

The instant feedback from the camera allowed her to rearrange and snap, rearrange and snap to her heart’s content. “Around the 60th shot I figured out that the leaf from the orange should go this way, and the flowers lean this way.” When she was done taking pictures of the scene, she continued to fine-tune the composition—or “work out the quirks,” as she puts it—after she downloaded it to her computer.

Business side of art
Even as she’s composing a piece, Honaker thinks about how to market or even license the finished product. Following a series of unlikely events, illustrating how Honaker has the knack for being at the right place at the right time, one of Honaker’s images ended up with Bentley Publishing Group in Walnut Creek.

The company licensed her image of a tableau of wine bottles and glasses entitled “And the Winner Is…” image. Now it appears on a plethora of household items, including table runners, place mats, coasters and pillows.

The items are sold mostly at big retail chains like Wal-Mart, and although she concedes that she “would have preferred they were for sale at Williams-Sonoma,” Honaker still has fun hearing from friends and family all over the country who have found items displaying her artwork. The royalty checks aren’t bad, either.

Rather than keeping the secret of successful licensing all to herself, Honaker had reps from Bentley come out and talk to her students about it. Bringing in the Bentley reps shows how Honaker wants her students to be more than just good artists—she wants them to be good businesspeople, too.

The stereotype is that artists don’t make good businesspeople, and vice versa. But that’s just silly to Honaker, who not only manages the business side of her work, but enjoys it as well. She credits her parents for teaching her business basics, because they both ran home-based businesses.

Honaker says, “My subjects reveal what is momentary; that is, less of an entire scene, and more of a glimpse.” This watercolor is called “Barrel Two.”

“I was around accounts payable and accounts receivable on a daily basis,” she remembers.

Commissions at age 12
Honaker began painting when she was 6 years old and painting seriously at age 10. By the time she was 12, she learned a major lesson in profit and loss. A Prudential life insurance agent in Omaha—near Columbus, Nebraska, where Honaker grew up—gave her a picture of the Rock of Gibraltar and asked if she could paint a picture of it.

When the agent asked Honaker how much she’d charge for the painting, she had to determine, as her father had taught her, how much she’d need to cover her expenses and how much her time was worth.

So she told him $100, but “the agent thought that was too low, so he gave me $135.” The agent’s district manager saw the painting, liked it and commissioned Honaker to paint another one. Word began to spread, and Honaker ended up painting about 100 Rock of Gibraltars (eventually raising her price to about $200 per painting).

Had Honaker decided to stay in Nebraska, how many more Rocks might there have been? But instead, in 1977, the year she graduated from the University of Nebraska with a fine arts degree, she married Carl Honaker, a navy pilot who is now Director of Airports for Santa Clara County.

That first year of marriage they lived in Italy—“a dream come true for an artist,” she says. From there, they traveled all over Europe and Northern Africa. They moved around until 1987, including to Japan and again to Italy, when they came to the Bay Area for back-to-back tours.

Carl retired when those ended, and the navy was willing to move the Honakers back to Nebraska, if they so chose.

“We thought about it for 30 seconds then decided to stay here,” she says. It wasn’t just the thought of cold, snowy winters that made her want to stay. “I’m glad I could stay here and dig in, and not have to reinvent myself every few years.”

Even if she wanted to move, it’s doubtful Honaker could find the time.

After taking a 20-year break from teaching, in the fall of 2004, during “a weak moment,” as she puts it, Honaker agreed to teach art at Quinlen in Cupertino, which she followed with a stint at University Art in the spring of 2005 and a three-week workshop that’s just wrapping up. In January, she’s starting an intermediate watercolor class at The Villages.

The image of Honaker’s “And the Winner Is…” was licensed by Bentley Publishing Group and now appears on a variety of tapestry and other household items. Photo courtesy of Karen Honaker

“The next 16 months or so are pretty well plotted out,” she says, mainly because she has to get ready for a show in March 2007. Called “Karen Honaker Times 2,” the show will feature work by Evergreen’s Karen Honaker and by another Karen Honaker, who lives in Ohio.

Meeting purely by chance several years ago when the Ohio Honaker happened to call the office of Art Calendar magazine while the West Coast Honaker was there, the two Midwest natives teamed up for a show this past June at the Legend Gallery at the Amory in Zanesville, Ohio.

Following the success of that show, the Prairiebrooke Gallery in Overland, Kansas, has signed them on for a show in 2007. Honaker needs 20 originals ready by then, and since she paints about 12 to 16 pieces per year, she needs to get cracking.

“By June 2007, I’ll be asking myself, ‘Now what?’”

Maybe then she’ll take a break. But don’t count on it.

To see more of Karen Honaker’s work, go to http://karenhonaker.com or visit these local galleries:

-Eriksen Gallery, 524 Main St., Half Moon Bay; (650) 726-1598

-MJ Schaer Gallery & Studio, Historic Napa Mill, 500 Main St., Napa; (707) 251-3726

-Studio Forty Two, 23 N. Santa Cruz Ave., Los Gatos; (408) 395-3191

“Karen Honaker Times 2” will be hosted in March 2007 by the Prairiebrooke Gallery, 7900 Santa Fe Dr., Overland Park, KS; (913) 341-0333.