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.

William Grimes, Varnette Honeywood, Whose Art Appeared on ‘Cosby Show,’ Dies at 59; NY TIMES, September 16, 2010.

In the late 1980’s, 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.