52 Faces: Drawing up a career - Burlington Hawk Eye

Art Center market manager Heidi Merrick has aspirations to teach at the college level

Heidi Merrick was a sophomore in high school when the powers that be in the Rock Ridge School District outside the Quad Cities decided to eliminate arts classes.

Left without her favorite subject, Merrick turned instead to the science department, and wound up enrolling in the University of Iowa following graduation in 2012 as a physical therapy major.

That changed her second year in Iowa City, when she found herself feeling jealous of a friend's roommate who was an art major.

"She got to do cool stuff," Merrick said. "Me, I had to go to a science lab."

Could someone who, as a second-grader, got into trouble for drawing "abstract art" on notebooks covers and selling her works for a dime on the playground really ever be anything other than an artist?

"I just had to give their dimes back," the 25-year-old Merrick said in a conspiratorial tone Friday, telling about the scope of the trouble she got into between helping visitors and callers to the Art Center of Burlington, where she teaches adult and youth classes and is manager of the Artists Market.

Upon graduating from Iowa in 2016 with a bachelor of fine arts in drawing, there was a period of about six months where she was working in a job not connected to art, and without any class requirements to push her to create, her art lacked inspiration. She found it a short drive from Iowa City, when her husband, Ben, a Des Moines area native she met in school, was hired to teach eighth- and ninth-grade English in the West Burlington schools.

For Heidi Merrick, the move to Burlington — and discovery of the Art Center, where she quickly found work — presented an opportunity to be part of an artistic community and to find an outlet and motivation for her own creative pursuits.

She said the scope of and passion for art in Burlington surprised her, considering the city's size.

The Snake Alley Art Fair was particularly appealing, and Merrick had a booth on the alley itself in 2018, joining other emerging artists in a section of the fair organized by Allied Creators Studio. Though not a member of the group, Merrick said she appreciates the collaborative atmosphere among its artists, whose studio is in the basement of the Art Center.

When not teaching or managing inventory for the Artists Market, Merrick's own art has taken on a digital element, with most of her drawing taking place on a Microsoft Surface Pro tablet. Working digitally wasn't prohibited, but wasn't encouraged in her program at Iowa, either, she said. Freed from any such limitations, the medium is where she created the images of a red-crowned crane and a red wolf she sold during last year's art fair, with a portion of each sale being donated to the World Wildlife Fund.

The wolf was inspired by the removal by President Donald Trump of protections against hunting wolves.

"I decided I could do a little something," Merrick said of the WWF contributions.

Drawings of both the crane and wolf are available still in the Artists Market. For the 2019 fair, she's working on a hawksbill sea turtle, and will add a to-be-determined second new critter.

While the colorful images aren't the many-shaded lines and shapes done in graphite, charcoal or ink on paper often associated with drawing, a close examination shows the strokes and lines of a digital pencil. Merrick paints, too, she said, but doesn't enjoy painting the same way she enjoys drawing, and isn't as "driven to advance" her art in that medium.

Art Center director Tammy McCoy described Merrick as a "fantastic" manager, teacher and artist. The fact that hiring her helped to encourage a young artist was icing on the cake, but fit perfectly within the center's mission, and McCoy's, to support and promote artists exposure, sales and even employment.

"We're lucky to have her," McCoy said.

Soon, though, if Merrick's application to graduate school at Iowa State University for the fall semester is successful, the opportunity she has enjoyed in Burlington could become someone else's.

The program at ISU has appeal because its more open to non-traditional media, she said. That will help her advance her own art while working toward a master's degree that would allow her to teach art at the collegiate level.

While she waits for her application to be considered, Merrick will continue to draw, and to teach at the Art Center. She will continue to enjoy walking her dog, an adopted husky named Arya, around Burlington's "gorgeous" Crapo and Dankwardt parks.

And, in her spare time, she will continue to play video games, which might have been a career had she stuck with a post-physical therapy brush with a major in informatics, which is a combination of art and computer science.

"I decided," Merrick said, "I more-so like to play video games than make them."

Everybody has a story to tell. Tell yours, or encourage someone you know to tell theirs, in 52 Faces, each week in The Hawk Eye. Call (319) 758-8148, or write to cneises@thehawkeye.com.

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