Meet the Artist: Jaimie Pyle

Painting Willis Carrier

Jaimie is 71. And she'll tell you, without a hint of irony, that she still thinks of herself as a seeking, curious, hopeful girl.

For years, art had to wait. She raised her kids and built a career in civil service, and the creative stuff got squeezed into whatever corners were left. Retirement changed that. Her first show with us was a step back toward the work she loved. This one is a full return.

She works in just about everything: acrylic, ink, pencil, clay, fabric, wood, leather. What ties it together is people. She's drawn to the way we can brilliantly create and destroy in equal measure, sometimes in the same lifetime.

For Builders + Titans, she's painting Willis Carrier, the engineer behind modern air conditioning. It's a quieter kind of influence. Nobody walks into a cool room and thinks about who made it possible. That's exactly the point.

Jaimie wants her work to pull memory and emotion out of whoever's standing in front of it.

When she's not making something, you'll find her on a motorcycle, taking the long way through some corner of the country she hasn't seen yet.