A Portrait of the Artist: Jackie Hoysted

"If you use the same medium over and over again, you lose the opportunity to say it another way," says Jackie Hoysted, a multimedia artist based in Gaithersburg, Maryland with the ability to convey her message through painting, video and installation art—sometimes simultaneously.

Perhaps best known for her "Ashes to Ashes - Send Me Your Last Cigarette" project, Hoysted enshrines mementos of last smokes. Those committed to quitting smoking mail the artist their last cigarette, which she incorporates in a piece of artwork dedicated to the victorious quitter. She often uses a temple format for her pieces to evoke the sense of celebration, death and renewal "with temptation always lurking around." Hoysted maintains a blog, which documents her tributes to every last cigarette—often accompanied by a heart-wrenchingly humorous goodbye letter—that has made it into her mailbox.

Stemming from a personal desire to quit smoking and extend her effort into a social agenda, Hoysted's project, which began in 1997, took a 3-dimensional turn when she created a public installation for Amnesty International's 2010 Human Rights Festival in Silver Spring. Humorous yet somber, the installation juxtaposed the glamorous image of smoking prevalent in cigarette advertisements with the adverse health effects of the addictive habit. Housed in a 10x10-foot jail cell, mannequins plastered with cigarette ads and donned in cigarette butts as ammunition, and video clips of a woman dying from smoking, overlaid with clips of Italian actress Silvia Mangano chain smoking in the 1954 film Mambo, illustrated the ongoing cultural and personal battle with addiction to smoking.

"The installation was especially popular with children," said the artist who is clearly set out to make a permanent difference. When she undertook this project, she realized that there was no going back.

"I had tried on several occasions to quit smoking, but I only lasted a couple of weeks off cigarettes. When I decided to quit and solicit last cigarettes from people on the same journey, I did an interview with Lenny Campello for the Washington City Paper, and people started to write about me, so I couldn't go back to smoking without huge embarrassment."

Hoysted was not always an artist. When she moved to the United States, she took a job as a software engineer for Amtrak. Originally from Dublin, Ireland, she also lived in France, England and Miami, Florida before settling in Gaithersburg 15 years ago. It's the longest she has ever lived in one place, she said. Six years ago she decided to apply to the Corcoran School of Art's Master of Fine Arts program.

"Once I took up art, a whole new world of friendship and feeling settled in," said Hoysted who bought her first book on how to draw shortly after getting married in 1994.

"As a kid I was in charge of food decoration at family parties, and I rearranged a lot of furniture, but I mostly wrote a lot of fiction. I hardly did anything like drawing."

A couple of years at the Corcoran and a series of advanced figure drawing classes with Lida Stifel at the Yellow Barn Studio and Gallery in Glen Echo, Maryland, and later, at the Torpedo Factory in Alexandria, Virginia, where she was able to work from longer five-hour poses, brought Hoysted up to speed with her craft.

"Being an artist can be solitary. I started figure drawing to get out of the house," said Hoysted who eventually led her own figure-based classes at VisArts in Rockville.

"I especially like it when I don't know the models at all. You start to project your own emotions onto them, and the resulting work becomes a mishmash of what's going on in your head and the seemingly vacant expression on their faces. I am not interested in an accurate representation of the figure but in the projection of a mood."

Hoysted has had several solo shows featuring her figure work in the Washington, DC-area, including one at the Fischer Gallery in Alexandria, at the Delaplaine Art Center in Frederick and at Glenview Mansion in Rockville. Her first solo show was at Gaithersburg City Hall in 2007 when she was trying to find her voice by painting everything around her. In 2010 she was also in a group show at the Arts Barn in Gaithersburg.

She is currently preparing for a show at the Art League Gallery in Alexandria, Virginia. Planned to run during October 2011, the show calls into question what is original and what is a copy and is titled "Copy or Fake." In preparation for this exhibit, Hoysted took a ceramics course in Baltimore and has created ceramic sculpture heads, which she has been photographing, painting and then photographing again as two-dimensional works in an effort to get the viewer to deliberate the question she sets out to explore.

"When I started out as an artist, I copied Modigliani to learn how to draw," said Hoysted who also claims that Salvador Dali's work has had a profound effect on her as an artist.

"I can't resist the figure," she said. "Photoshop is also very addictive. I am interested in transformation and manipulation."

Hoysted, who often paints from photographs and engages multiple media at once, sees her work as project-based and about transforming the self and generating a positive message for others.

She created "Zooming In, The Rooftop Series" from a series of photographs she took in Jaipur and Pushkar, India where the sky was blue and the rooftops glimmered in the sun, she said. She blew up the original digital photographs, printed them out and painted over them with encaustic to recreate the glimmer effect. "What's Inside" emerged from a similar multilayer process that served as a mental escape from a series of bad news related to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Hoysted wanted to create something beautiful and let herself go in the process of transforming a negative experience into colorful phase-shifts through multimedia manipulation.

"I prefer not to get locked into painting. At the Corcoran I discovered that I liked all media. Digital art and painting with Bill Newman was fun, and as a result I learned how to paint. I would not have learned how to draw without Tom Morris's classes. I also took a theory class with Mark Cameron Boyd that taught me how to choose parameters for my projects. Now that I've experimented with video, I want to learn animation. Different materials elicit different reactions from people, and who knows, maybe something new will pop up."

Always ahead of the curve, Hoysted is preparing a new body of figurative work that will combine Minimalism and Expressionism for a March 2012 show at Gallery 555 in Washington, D.C. She also has an upcoming show at the Ratner Museum in January of 2013.

To visit the artist's website, click here.