From Perry County, Indiana, Lydia Ham, awed UNC Asheville’s art community for the last four years using her creative outlets to express herself and practice her craft.
Ham, 21, said she grew up surrounded by the rolling farmland of southern Indiana, an environment that quietly influenced her early artistic inclinations.
Ham started painting eight years ago when she was 13 years old. She became the oldest to two younger siblings in the house after her older sister left for college.
“It was strange because I had been the youngest child, the middle child and now the ‘oldest’,” Ham said.
Ham said she didn’t succumb to the normal amount of media that everyone her age was consuming. Ham said she wasn’t the most sociable person, but whenever she would try her mother would intervene.
“She took my phone away for a whole summer and that was actually the reason why I started to paint because I had nothing to do,” Ham said.
Ham said with only acrylic paint, some cheap canvases and a rock music radio station to keep her mind busy she started practicing her craft.
“I wanted to do it. I wanted to be a real artist and I knew that artists in college would do still life paintings of fruits or flower vases so a lot of my work from around high school was just me doing that and building up my technique cause I didn’t know what I was doing,” Ham said.
Ham said her art and artistic visions only grew from there.
“About my senior year of high school was when I started to be ready to make original work and not just basic objects and actually starting to build my own concepts,” Ham said.
Ham is currently in her fourth year as a painting major at UNCA. Her paintings explore the themes of femininity, intimacy and vulnerability.
“A lot of my paintings are inspired by my writings, whether it’s a journal entry or a story,” Ham said, “and I’ve thought about including them in my show but you have to be really brave to be vulnerable and I wanna give myself time to really have it be something that I want to share in a gallery space,” she said
Ham’s portrayal of vintage femininity sticks with people.
“Her art is amazing. I’m not a big art person but her art is amazing,” said Director of Highsmith Student Union Operations, Robert Straub.
Ham said most of her paintings are not very saturated, are about the effects of “sucky misogynistic men” and are intended for a feminine audience.
“I love the soft, very girly feel in all of my paintings and having that dark edgy subject matter to contrast those feminine themes,” Ham said.
Ham is in the B.F.A. program at UNCA’s art department which she said is one of the hardest programs to get into on campus.
“Every two weeks for critique we’re supposed to have one painting started, one halfway, and one almost finished,” Ham said, “so sometimes I will spend the night in Owen Hall. I have a coffee pot in my studio in case I need caffeine to stay awake. Me and the other students in it, we have such a strong community because we’re always there in Owen,””
Other students in the art department said they spend a good chunk of their time practicing their craft and working on assignments that work towards their senior exhibition.
“In the middle of the semester, every single professor in the art department comes together to critique your work and decide if you should stay in the program or not,” Ham said.
Ham said after the final critique, the professors decide if you need to stay a third semester on probation. she said it doesn’t happen often but when it does, it usually has to do with the quantity over quality.
“Sometimes people will get on that third semester just for not having enough to show because you have to be able to fill the gallery space for your senior exhibition at the very end once you’re done,” Ham said.
According to Ham, the program is very research and concept heavy. The work that is made must have meaning and needs to be explained.
“I don’t think that I would be making the work that I’m making right now, and I don’t think I would have the courage to share the meaning if it wasn’t for Suzie,” Ham said about Assistant Professor for painting Suzanne (Suzie) Dittenber.
Ham says Dittenber was the first person she spoke to about what the real personal meanings were, and she pushed her to show more.
Dittenber said she appreciates how hard Ham works to make her work authentic, true and sincere to herself and helped Ham convey the meanings of her work with other people.
Ham said being able to explain the vision of her work is something she takes pride in because it allows her to be more vulnerable, but it can be difficult to take critique with a grain of salt.
“I always have to remind people and even myself that I’m the artist, I know the vision and I know that whatever I make, it will be done beautifully and the best that I can,” Ham said.
