http://artistsofutah.org/15Bytes/index.php/toni-youngblood/
An architect who rescues greyhounds retired from racing; an accomplished artist who does paintings of the saxophones she plays; an environmentalist who recycles to an admittedly obsessive extent — Toni Youngblood is an intriguing woman who constantly keeps busy.
Though she works in a variety of mediums, encaustic is her current fascination, and a number of works in this medium will be on display at Bountiful’s Howa Gallery for its grand opening. Youngblood loves the colors, textures and layers in encaustic work: “I’m not tempted to do anything really representational,” she states. “You can scrape down to previous colors and then re-fuse it with a torch and that will smooth things out. But sometimes I just love the scraping marks. And it smells so good.” She lifts up a finished work for me to check out and it, indeed, has a dreamy scent. “Those honeybees,” she says, “the little sweethearts.”
Originally from Atlanta, Youngblood, 61, received her bachelor’s degree in painting from California’s San Jose State University, where she took advanced drawing and advanced figure painting classes from LeConte Stewart’s son, Maynard Dixon Stewart. “Back then, I had no idea who LeConte Stewart was . . . I found myself the other night quoting Dix Stewart to my students, ‘You start with the general and then you work towards the specific.’ I just read that Alvin Gittins said the same thing to his students! I don’t know if that came from Gittins to LeConte Stewart to Stewart’s son – I guess it was LeConte Stewart who hired Gittins so they must have had a lot of time to talk. But I thought, ‘Oh my god, here I am saying the same things I learned from his son.’”
She pursued her master’s in architecture at the University of Washington in Seattle. Her thesis was based upon creating a theoretical museum to house the art collection of Harry and Mary Margaret Anderson that she had once worked for in the Bay Area – considered one of the most outstanding private collections of 20th-century American art in the world. “I knew at some point in the future they were going to be doing this,” says Youngblood. “Either building a museum or donating the collection to a museum, and they had already donated some pieces to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The collector gave me the accession log of all the artwork so I could get measurements of everything, and I knew what everything was and created a design for the museum, but I needed an actual site.” She found one near Stanford University. “Here’s the really funny thing. In this last year, the Andersons actually donated the collection, a big portion of it, to Stanford University and there is a building built there now. I mean it was a dream project for me, and to have it so close to reality.”
She worked as an architect for Starbucks in Seattle for six years, later learning through her Facebook connection with Utah artist Fred Lyman that her favorite boss was, coincidentally, his daughter, Cydnie Horwat. Youngblood moved to Utah in 2006, to work for an architecture firm that had a large reduction in force after she had purchased her house. Nevertheless she was determined to do art – to somehow make that happen. Offered another architecture job, she asked to work a four-day week so she could pursue her artwork. When they said no, she turned them down and “never looked back. I just had to figure out how I could live.”
So she scrambled. She’s managed to juggle mundane jobs, like managing rental properties, with more passionate affairs, like art, and greyhounds.
“I wanted a dog at a point in my life where I owned my own house. But I didn’t want a puppy that would tear up my furniture,” Youngblood recalls. After learning a bit about the retired greyhound population and going to a meet and greet, “I said to myself, this sounds like a perfect dog for me.” Now, she has two: Harri is her shy little girl and Rocket, called Rocky, her boy.
Greyhounds typically do their maiden race at 18 months and are retired immediately if they don’t take to the sport. They only sprint for 30 seconds several times a week. Those who have a career are retired at 5 or 6 years of age. Usually they are put down by their owners, but organizations are forming to save them, since the dogs live to be 12 to 15. They sleep a lot, are mellow and quiet (“not good watchdogs,” says Youngblood). There are numerous “Adopt a Greyhound” projects in Utah that can be found online.
