The Opposite of Darkness, Always

Carolyn Hall Young 1953 - 2016

By Aimee Liu

 Why does this story matter? Because of the feeling. Because of the love. Because Carolyn Hall Young embodied the opposite of darkness, and because you never know what you’ll get to be grateful for.

I want to tell you about one extraordinary human being. She was the artist Carolyn Hall Young. Here’s why you need to know about her.

When most artists talk about negative space, they’re referring to the ground around the figure, the air around the object, the surrounding darkness that defines light. For Carolyn, however, negative space also described the unpredictable bounty of life.

Carolyn was a painter and graphic designer. A pioneer in the fields of mobile digital art and car audio design. A survivor whose secret powers consist of love, beauty, and joy. The connective force linking virtual communities of friends and innovators in technology, medicine, art, and education around the globe. Some describe her as a miracle worker. Others think of her simply as a miracle of humanity.

For nearly thirty years – half her life -- Carolyn lived with stage-four non-Hodgkin lymphoma – emphasis on living. Soon after she was first diagnosed, she and her husband, Warren, moved to a little town outside of Santa Fe, where they bought a four-acre ranch, rebuilt a dilapidated 160-year-old adobe farmhouse, planted gardens and transformed their life to include four horses, cats, dogs, and a rural community that bore no resemblance either to the urban culture they’d left behind in Phoenix or to Greenwich, Connecticut, where Carolyn grew up.

Most of this transformation they accomplished with their own hands, aided by their neighbors. And today the walls are crowded with paintings that reflect this remade life. As Warren says, she is everywhere. A coffee cup beams with light in one of Carolyn’s canvasses. Her late white steed Terbay grazes in another. Three pears glow in a pottery plate, and serape-draped chairs under the New Mexican sky fill several panels. The presence of the woman who filled the cup, nurtured (and was nurtured by) the horse, grew the pears, and occupied those chairs is as palpable as the hand, eye, and heart that created these paintings. That’s another dimension of negative space.

“You never know what you’ll get to be grateful for,” long ago became Carolyn’s mantra. This statement drew on her gift for transforming accidents on paper or canvas into elements of beauty. It also reflected her gratitude for the failure of a first marriage that left her free to find Warren, who shared her life, courage, and love through the final moments. Carolyn applied her mantra, too, to the multiple rounds of high-dose chemo and any number of other treatments, experiments, and ordeals that caused indescribable suffering and helped her stay “on this planet” far longer than anyone could have predicted.

“You never know,” Carolyn often repeated. “That moment may be horrible, but you’ve got to give thanks first and ask questions later.” Not that this was easy. Negative space doesn’t stop being negative when it’s transformed; it just becomes positive in equal or greater measures.

In 2001 Carolyn told a reporter who was writing an article about her for the local paper, “I tend my garden, and it nourishes me.” When in bloom this garden is a profusion of flox, hollyhocks, campanula, iris, roses, delphinium, lilies, and lavender, plus herbs and dozens of varieties of heirloom tomatoes. It flows around boulders that Carolyn moved into place with her own under-90-pound grit. The result is planned but open to the unexpected, exuberant with a backbone of quiet gray toughness. Changing constantly from season to season, its messy and uncertain grace is a living reminder that you never know what you’ll get to be grateful for.

For almost as long as she lived with cancer Carolyn peer counseled other seriously ill patients. Many of them didn’t make it. “And when someone dies,” she’d say, “I want to throw myself on the floor and wail. I want to scream and swear.” Sometimes she did just that, but then she turned to her box of rubber blocks and started carving four-letter words backwards and reversed, preparing to turn negative space into positive imprints of love. LOVE was one of those four-letter words, along with HOPE, GOOD, RISK, LIFE, CARE, GIVE, HOLD, and FEEL. Backwards and reversed, the process itself became a metaphor for her emotions in grief. But then, as she pressed those carved-out ink blocks into the paper, the letters would emerge as if formed by light, restored to their desired order and form. And she then sent these printed messages of mercy to the families who’d lost the person they loved. And it helped.

Love always helps. When Carolyn was still able to work, she brought this same spirit to the award-winning car audio systems she designed for Precision Power and Xtant Technologies, from the circuit boards to the painted casings, to all the marketing and advertising materials that promoted her Art Series Amplifiers. Recently she was asked to autograph one of her old car audio banners, and she added the inscription: “Listen for the LOVE of it to the Art of it for the SOUL in it and the FUN of it...Because you know when it's right.” Far from an advertising slogan, Carolyn’s words summed up her philosophy of life.

More recently she had to apply this philosophy to art that she could produce without leaving her bed, but – thanks to her trusty iPad Air 2 -- that didn’t slow her down. Using a multitude of mobile art tools and apps -- often beta testing them for their creators -- Carolyn produced more than sixteen hundred iPad portraits as gifts for friends and acquaintances around the globe, many of whom she’d never physically met. Even though she herself couldn’t travel, her work flew far, winning awards in mobile digital art competitions from Kansas City to Florence, Italy.

Each of her digital portraits began with a photograph or two or three, which then took on the texture of collage or the subtlety of oil paint, or the feathery lightness of water color or pastels. Often they incorporated elements of the person’s life that could not be photographed. The portrait she made for one friend, a writer, included a pigeon and lettering that spelled out the magnanimous phrase, infinite goodness has such wide arms, but also featured two black crows and a telegram from Dorothy Parker to her editor despairing about ever finding the right words. Carolyn was too keen an observer and too honest a friend to leave out the negative aspects of a person’s true nature, but in typical fashion she converted them with love into elements of grace.

A few years ago, while recuperating from one of several excruciating radiation treatments, she was visited by a telephone repairman who, after fixing her phone, revealed that he was wrestling with some difficult life questions of his own. Most people in this situation would have been too preoccupied with their own pain to worry about such questions. Not Carolyn.

“Ask yourself what you want,” she told this stranger. “Most people only want what they think they want. Don’t think. Feel. Whatever you truly feel you want, make that happen.” Feeling is the negative space that turns thinking into love.

Last summer Carolyn’s body weakened. She lost the strength to send her usual notes, talk on the phone, or create digital artwork. She began a new round of treatment and, predictably, was soon captivating her doctors and the hospital staff. Her spirit never diminished, and the treatment eradicated her cancer, which renewed her hope. However, the toll on her valiant little body this time proved too great.

On Friday, December 23, 2016, Carolyn’s spirit parted company from her physical being. Now she truly is everywhere and always will be, with each of us who knew and loved her, forever.

Why does this story matter? Because of the feeling. Because of the love. Because Carolyn Hall Young embodied the opposite of darkness, and because you never know what you’ll get to be grateful for.

Live. Love. Create. And feel each moment with truth and joy.