Character Studies is an INDY series about familiar faces around the Triangle—and the stories you may not know about them.
When first I arrived at Ikigai Studios & Gallery in Downtown Cary to interview artist Kathryn “Tiki” McIntyre, she was giving an impromptu tour to a man who had wandered into her studio. He was drawn in by the vibrant neons and pastels splashed across her paintings he could see through the window, he said.
It was a fitting first impression; most find McIntyre because her work’s striking colors catch their eye at a community art show. Or because, after wandering away from Bond Brothers Eastside, the neighboring brewery and live music venue, they discover McIntyre painting in her studio late at night.
Then, people come back for more of McIntyre’s artwork, but also the studio events she hosts, including paint & sips, date-night-paint-nights, bellydancing, poetry readings, summer camps, and interactive commissions.
McIntyre begins her creative process by meditating or praying to tap into what her Guardian Angel and spirit guides are urging her to put on the canvas. She also draws from dreams and memories, which is why it makes sense that nearly all of her pieces are abstract. (She explained this all while I was fighting a glance at the Dolly Parton and Taylor Swift standees looming on a tall ledge above where we sat.)
“It’s like something happens in my hands, and they just do their own thing. It’s the weirdest thing, kind of, ever,” she said.
McIntyre said one of her favorite abstract pieces is “St. Michael,” which she got up to paint one night after the prayer of St. Michael the Archangel was roaring in her mind on repeat. The painting resembles a pair of gold wings, which McIntyre said encapsulates the protective energy of the prayer—and though she is a Catholic, she said she had never memorized it.
“I usually paint very bright colors, but that painting is creamy colors, pale blues, golds. Which, I don’t know how that happened. Except that I didn’t do it,” she said, explaining that her process involves channeling energy rather than making deliberate, conscious choices.
McIntyre, a Duke University-licensed health and well-being coach, said she got into wellness working in her father’s hardware store as a kid in the ‘80s, where they sold the nutritional supplement BarleyLife. She’s been hooked on it since, and still swears by it for pain relief and energy.
Hailing from New Orleans, McIntyre studied exercise physiology and art at Louisiana State University after discovering those passions in middle and high school. She went on to work as a personal trainer for 17 years, but started taking art classes again after having her two daughters in her early forties (a feat she credited to her affinity for wellness).
“That was my time for me, you know, to just get back into it,” McIntyre said.
But McIntyre said she needed her own space. After moving to the Cary area in 2022, she began the search for a studio “that wasn’t the third floor of my house with the four feral cats that traveled with us here.” She found a landlord with the help of her friends at the Fine Arts League of Cary. But McIntyre paused before describing how she got her little spot off East Chatham Street.
“So I had a dream the night my mom died,” she began. It wasn’t clear where this was going.
She set the scene: A large, festive family party, with her grandfather busy moving their belongings about the place. “And people are teasing him and saying, ‘Robert, come enjoy the party.’ He’s like, ‘I have to take care of one more thing before this all happens,’” she recounted.
She called her sister to describe the dream, just for her to inform McIntyre that their mother had died a few hours ago. McIntyre retold her dream again at her mother’s funeral, and said she experienced another bout of divine timing—or intervention—later that day.
“It’s so funny because my phone rang, and it was the landlord for this place,” she said, gesturing to her studio. “I was sitting down with my aunts, just talking. I answered the phone, and then said, ‘Oh my God, the landlord just offered me the space’. They said, ‘No, that was your mom.’”
Ever since her mother died, McIntyre said fondly, “it’s like she’s all over the place” in her studio. She wiped a couple of tears from her face and pointed to a nearby photo of her mother.
These are the kinds of experiences that drive McIntyre to create, she said, and inspire her to memorialize those of others with her “Canvas of Memories” commissions. Customers come to her studio with their loved ones, bringing notes, ticket stubs, toys, photos, or whatever they want the painting to encapsulate. They put them on the canvas, and paint alongside McIntyre, and then, she finishes the piece by layering more paint atop it with their intentions in mind.
McIntyre said she does these commissions because she wants to help others understand themselves and their life experiences, a kind of meditation which she said has culminated in her favorite works. And she thinks it’s serendipitous that she gets to do it in the studio her mother blessed her with.
“I strongly believe that everything happens for the good,” she said.
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