Khrysso Heart LeFey is a visual artist, folk musician, wordsmith, liturgist, and consultant living in Morongo Valley, CA, USA, though he has lived all over the United States. He has written for news and feature periodicals, technical publishers, and marketing services, and he still does a bit of editing from time to time. His thoughtful expression is posted at khrysso.com.
He is a self-taught artist, having become interested in collage and collecting paper in the 1990s when he was working full time as a gay-rights activist. With a degree in Linguistics from Ohio State and lots of experience with words and letters, in recent years he began to explore the notion of written figures as pure form, divorced from any meaning that the letters and numbers might symbolize, and that way of looking at writing continues to fascinate him. He tends to pursue those explorations in his paper-collage work. He also developed a technique he calls “digitized collage,” scanning and manipulating images electronically. Although nearly all of his art is nonrepresentationa—that is, not depicting anything—with a master’s degree in Theological Studies he feels certain that his spiritual interests influence all of his life as a visual artist.
Khrysso has amblyopia and astigmatism, two eye conditions that affect the way he perceives spatial relationships, and what his optometrist calls a “slight color deficiency.” Doubtless as a result of these conditions, he tends to prefer colors, patterns, and textures that are bold and intense. For many years he saw these conditions as handicaps to his life as an artist, but with time he has concluded that all artists see the world in different ways, and, for him, being an artist is all about how he looks at the world: it calls upon him to look, and to look again, and to look again. Although he likes his output—he wouldn’t make it publicly available if he didn’t—for him, the work is in the looking. The pleasing output is, in a sense, incidental to the process.
Khrysso’s work has shown in Ohio at Second April Galerie, The Dreg Spot, Cyrus Art Gallery, The Saxton Gallery, the Canton Museum of Art, DW Downtown, Western Reserve Hospital, Massillon Museum, Puffenberger Hall, Studio 2091, and others. He was presented in solo shows in Tennessee and Ohio, and was an owner of Codgers and Crones, a co-op gallery in Ohio.
Since moving to California, he has shown at the Yucca Valley Arts Center, the California Welcome Center, Rainbow Stew, The Glass Outhouse, the Hi-Desert Nature Museum, and as a featured artist at Gallery 62, with Chapparal Artists, and at the Art Colony of Morongo Valley. He is a juried artist at the Desert Art Center Gallery in Palm Springs. His work is included in numerous private collections.
He takes much inspiration from artists in other media involving piecework: stained glass, quilting, and mosaic.