Constance Humphries likes exquisite “wads of things.” See one of them at a prestigious show at the Asheville Art Museum this month.

by Ursula Gullow . portrait by Naomi Johnson

Her paintings—unlike much of the rest of her life—are a total mess. In one of them, Swing, currently on display in the Asheville Art Museum show Color Study, tangles of grey interact with strokes of pink and blue, all bursting onto a field of white. “I find mess really interesting,” says Humphries, 45. “Whether it’s in nature, or whether it’s crowds, or in the thrift store where everything is just in piles. I’m simultaneously interested and really freaked out by disorganization.”

To make her gestural paintings, Humphries, an Asheville native, begins by creating an “under-painting” using relatively random marks and colors. Then, she paints the dominating marks, which takes hours. “I have to do it slowly and carefully or else I’ll create mud,” she says.

It’s a combination of the right brain and left, control and chaos, that seems to run through her entire life. After getting a degree in art from UNC-Asheville, Humphries lived in Chapel Hill and got a master’s degree in information science. Then she moved to New York City for several years, working in digital media and web design for MTV and Nickelodeon’s parent company, Viacom. When she moved back to Asheville in 2000, she signed up to teach digital media classes at A-B Tech.

But her first love is painting, which she does every day in a West Asheville studio. Her husband, Mike O’Kane, is also a painter and computer science teacher at A-B Tech (“There were two of us in the world and we married,” she quips). She also keeps busy following the career of her singer/songwriter father Don Humphries, who lives in Asheville and whose bluegrass and country songs have been recorded by Patty Loveless, Del McCoury and others.

With all that in the mix, making time to paint takes discipline. “I don’t do anything else,” she says, laughing. “I teach and I paint. Something one of my instructors said that I’ll always remember: If you want to make good art, you have to make a lot of it.”

These days, she is doing just that—cranking out art, including collages of cut-up paintings on paper. The abstract work, including the “messy” series that ended up in this fall’s museum show, is a departure from her figurative painting of the past. A collection of her images of children’s faces was on display in Tryon’s Upstairs Gallery last year. Remarking on her evolving aesthetic style, she says: “I’m more interested in visual problems than I am visual solutions.”

Color Study at the Asheville Art Museum runs through November 6. Her work will hang in the Second Annual Invitational Exhibition at the S. Tucker Cooke Gallery at UNC-Asheville through October 25. Look for her in the Waking up with Van Gogh exhibit next year at The Hickory Art Museum. www.constancehumphries.com.