Courtney Hunt
Beginnings
“We need beauty because it makes us ache to be worthy of it.” | Mary Oliver
Courtney Hunt is an impressionist artist hailing from the dreamy, slow-moving, swampy lowcountry of South Carolina.
She was largely raised by a family of generous river otters in the magical Appalachian mountains, where she grew up wild, cultivating her love of art and Nature. Making art and traipsing through the woods provided fantastic escapes during childhood. Courtney especially treasured the solitude that drawing gifted her.
“I always liked alone time when I was little: drawing, fantasy novels, playing in the woods were all my escapes. As I got older, I went back to art; I was never able to shake it off.”
Innately creative, Courtney dabbled in woodburning, knitting, tattooing, embroidery, and sketching comics over the years before discovering her true calling with paints. In 2010, Courtney picked up canvas, some paints, and a few brushes, intending to create gifts for friends and family while living on a poor college student’s budget. The deep gratitude and overwhelmingly positive responses from the recipients of her gifts infused Courtney with more than enough encouragement to dive deeper into the world of painting.
Eight years later, Courtney started painting full-time.
A Comment to the World
And that is just the point… how the world, moist and beautiful, calls to each of us to make a new and serious response. That’s the big question, the one the world throws at you every morning. “Here you are, alive. Would you like to make a comment?” | Mary Oliver
While Courtney has been privileged to call some fantastic artists her mentors, she is primarily self-taught. Courtney’s human inspirations whose work informs her paintings include a variety of artists (Christina Weaver, Michelle Morin, Colby Sanford); poets and authors (Mary Oliver, of course, and John O’Donohue, Eckhart Tolle, Rick Rubin), and musicians (Christian Hunt! <3 <3 <3, Isaac Brock, Sufjan Stevens). She is amazed by anything and everything all at once.
Courtney enjoys the call and response between humans and earth—of going out into nature, listening to its call, then responding in her own unique manner through her work, which she hopes will then serve as a call to other humans, eliciting a deeper connection with others and the earth. She is inspired by the spiritual relationships between [Wo]Man and the Universe, as well as the interconnectedness of all creatures and things of this planet.
She finds great beauty and pain in the many facets of life and death, and knows that the intense emotions she feels in response to the interplay of the darkness and lightness of being are what drives her to create.
“I feel like my subject matter changes a lot. Too much, too soon, too quickly. I get bored. But to me, the message is always (usually) the same. No matter the subject, I feel like I’m always painting lightness. Like, trying to countervail the burden of being alive—to lighten the load of being human.”