Erika Eckerson was a broke TV news anchor with a bare living room wall in her Myrtle Beach apartment when she decided to buy a canvas, acrylic paint, and some brushes.
“I wanted a piece of art to hang over my sofa, and I couldn’t afford anything,” she recalls. This was 2010, when she was fresh out of the University of South Carolina and working at a CBS affiliate, first as reporter for the morning newscast, then as its co-anchor. “And then I (painted) it, and it was awful, and I became determined to teach myself.”
As Eckerson—who used her maiden name, Hayes, on air—moved up at the Myrtle Beach station, she saw a less glamorous side to TV news.
“I felt really lonely,” Eckerson says. “I was plugged in enough to do my job, but I didn’t really want to put down roots, because I knew I would just have to leave. So I spent a lot of time by myself.”
Eckerson would sit in her apartment and brush bold, abstract streaks of acrylic across canvas. Painting, she says, became a form of therapy. And it followed her to Charlotte in 2015.
We’re sitting on a comfortable, cream sofa in Eckerson’s family room on a warm October afternoon. Eckerson is wearing ripped jeans and a white oxford shirt, but her natural beauty gives me the sense she could be camera-ready with a Clark Kent-style zip in and out of a phone booth.
This story is from the Winter 2016 edition of Charlotte Home & Garden.
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This story is from the Winter 2016 edition of Charlotte Home & Garden.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 8,500+ magazines and newspapers.
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