Varnette Honeywood
(1950-2010)
“There’s always a message in my work, whether it is obvious or not...I hope that hundreds of years from now, African-American art will show the slice of the way we live.”
Black Art Auction is pleased to present two works for private sale by beloved artist Varnette Honeywood.
Kuumba (Creativity), 1983; mixed media (watercolor, crayon, colored pencil, metallic paint), 19 x 60 inches signed, titled, and dated.
Rites I, 1983
Rites I, 1983; mixed media/collage (with cotton and string ties), 42-1/2 x 24-1/2 inches, signed, titled, and dated.
Children are the reward of life.
Life is a shadow and a mist;
It passes quickly by and is no more.
SOLD
Varnette Honeywood was born in 1950 into a family of educators. Her parents, Love and Stepny Honeywood were elementary school educators who often tested their art curriculums on Varnette and her sister. Varnette would go on to teach multicultural arts and crafts programs to minority children in public schools.
A graduate of Spelman College, Honeywood began publishing note cards and prints from her original acrylic paintings with her sister, Stephanie. The two sisters founded Black Lifestyles with the goal of distributing Varnette’s work on posters, prints, and notecards, ultimately bringing positive multicultural images into as many Black homes as possible. This is something for which she worked tirelessly throughout her career.
“Ms. Honeywood, whose bright colors and simplified forms were strongly influenced by narrative artists like Romare Bearden and Jacob Lawrence, developed a socially conscious style of genre painting that showed black Americans in familiar settings: interacting with family members, gathering at church, socializing on a front porch.
She drew inspiration in her early work from the area around McComb, Miss., where her grandparents lived. Later, assembling semiabstract forms into complex patterns, she depicted daily life in the neighborhoods around her in Los Angeles.”
In the late 1980s, a reproduction of Ms. Honeywood’s painting, Birthday, appeared in the living room on the set of The Cosby Show across from Senegalese Boy by Archibald John Motley, Jr. Her work appeared on many television programs, including My Wife and Kids, Smart Guy, The Steve Harvey Show, Gullah Gullah Island, Golden Girls, Melrose Place, Amen, 227, and A Different World.
A selection of works presented by Black Lifestyles. Varnette and her sister Stephanie founded the company in the mid-1970’s with the goal of distributing Varnette’s work on posters, prints, and notecards.
