The first creative works of art Beryl McCormack finished didn’t hang from walls so much as cover them. Illegally.
Today, her paintings are a focal point of NHTI’s annual student capstone exhibit.
In between was a winding, 20-year journey of self-discovery that included an escape from a dangerous drug lifestyle, the blossoming of a family that includes a devoted husband and five children and, beginning last summer, the rebirth of a passion she had left on the streets of Atlanta.
“After graduating high school I moved (to Atlanta) and ended up in the wrong crowd doing graffiti. I basically dropped off the face of the Earth,” McCormack said. “It wasn’t until this past summer that I started getting back into (art). I said, ‘I don’t even know if I can paint anymore.’ ”
Spoiler alert: She can. Always an artistic child – she said she was tracing and redrawing things as early as second grade – McCormack was six classes shy of an associates degree at College of Charleston when she decided to stop going to school. It took more than two decades, but she mustered the nerve to enroll at NHTI more than a year ago and is now one math class away from graduating this summer. Her pieces headlined the school’s capstone exhibit, which opened last weekend and is now hanging in the NHTI library.
The return to school opened up new artistic doors, as McCormack discovered the palette knife and used it to create the majority of pieces shown in the capstone gallery.
Her style is unique, utilizing color to blend scenes into creative, cohesive paintings. Most of her art work is inspired by her life experience and dreams, she said.
“I see the colors as someone else would see skin tones,” McCormack said.
As you can imagine in a household with five children – the youngest is 6 months old and the oldest is 13 – chaos is part of McCormack’s daily routine. Which might explain how she calmly completed four paintings at once for the capstone project, working with all four canvases in front of her at the same time.
She spent about four weeks doing the project, dedicating about eight hours to each piece, and finished in the nick of time – the paint was barely dry when she brought the pieces to be hung in the gallery, she said.
The thought of hanging her own pieces in a gallery seemed like little more than a pipe dream for McCormack about 20 years ago, when she started heading down a potentially destructive path. She left school, found drugs and essentially watched herself let go of any semblance of direction.
It was McCormack who saved herself, though, as she made the decision to turn things around before it was too late.
“It could have been really bad,” McCormack said. “I could have stayed on drugs, stayed in that party lifestyle. But I felt like I needed to get out. I felt like I was better than that. I watched so many people pass away or go to jail and thought, I don’t want that lifestyle for myself. I wanted to be better.”
To that end she moved to New England, where she met her husband – “my very best friend,” she said – got married and started raising a family. The only downside to the scenario was that in order to be the kind of mother she wanted to be, she stayed home with the kids, further delaying the chance to return to school.
So when the time was finally right last year, she jumped in with both feet, even though she was working two jobs – one at the YMCA in Concord and another at a florist in Allenstown – while taking a full course load at NHTI.
Still, the experience allowed her to uncover talent she never knew she had, a discovery she credits at least in part to the faculty at NHTI.
“The professors here are amazing. They really pull it out of you,” McCormack said. “I wonder if my professors at College of Charleston had been like that and really nurtured that style if I’d have been somebody else right now. Here, they nurtured that part of me that doesn’t paint like somebody else. I wish I had this mentality to be great (when I was younger).”
The truth is she couldn’t be happier with who she is. She hasn’t yet graduated and is already seeing the fruits of her artistic labor – the NHTI library purchased one of her paintings from the capstone project, she’s had discussions about possibly hanging her work at Dos Amigos and has been commissioned to paint the double-decker bridge that separates Pembroke from Allenstown. But perhaps more importantly, and certainly more emotionally, she’s seeing her children develop an interest in following in her footsteps.
McCormack doesn’t have the luxury of working in a professional studio but instead happily puts “tacks on the wall and a canvas for whatever I’m going to paint” at home so her children can participate. Two of her sons are already sketching, and their attention to detail and understanding of color is “amazing,” she said.
“I’ve got some blooming artists in the house,” she said.
That’s a phrase she wouldn’t have fathomed uttering two decades ago. Somewhere in Atlanta, there’s probably still an original Beryl McCormack on the wall of an alley. But here in Concord she’s found the real Beryl McCormack: mother, painter, soon-to-be college graduate.
“I told my husband, this is like 20 years in the making,” she said.
