Khrysso Heart LeFey

KHRYSSO HEART LeFEY is a visual artist, folk musician, wordsmith, liturgist, and consultant living in Canton, Ohio, USA, which happens to be his birthplace, though he has lived all over the United States.

Khrysso studied French when he was in high school, so there were units on French Impressionists in his curriculum. At the time he was partial to the work of Camille Pissarro, though now his favorite French master is Henri Matisse, in no small part because Matisse specialized in collage during his later years.

He took a degree in Linguistics at Ohio State, thinking that he would become a Bible translator some day, but then his interests turned to teaching writing and, more significantly, to writing himself, an interest that he had first developed in the eighth grade. He has written for news and feature periodicals, technical publishers, and marketing services departments, and he still does a bit of editing from time to time.

He started becoming interested in collage and collecting paper when he dated an artist in the early 1990s, though the ‘90s were years for him of working as a gay-rights activist and then immersing himself in folk music. His collection of paper remained small during those years, but he still has some of it. It would be more than a decade before he would make visual art the center of his creative life.

Though he didn’t follow through on becoming a Bible translator, he did broaden his spiritual interests, getting a master’s degree in Theological Studies 20 years after he got his undergraduate degree. Although nearly all of his art is nonrepresentational–that is, not depicting anything, he feels certain that his spiritual interests influence all of his life as a visual artist.

Being facile with language has been part of his persona for as long as he can remember, but in his 50s he began to explore the notion of written figures as pure form, divorced from any meaning that the letters and numbers may symbolize, and that way of looking at writing continues to fascinate him. He continues to write and edit as well.