I recently attended the opening of Carclew's Women in Abstraction exhibition. At the event, the curator and artists in residence spoke about their work, the exhibition, and abstraction in general. If you get the chance, I definitely recommend checking out the exhibition.
I'm not much of a visual artist myself (that may be an understatement). But recently I've been struggling a lot with anxiety, so I've been experimenting with using art as a form of self-care. Inspired in part by the Carclew exhibition, I've found creating abstract work of my own both a relaxing exercise and a good emotional outlet.
I've always been drawn to watercolors in general, but I'm also kind of fascinated by the idea of digital watercolors. There's no actual water. A lot of the unpredictability (and with that, perhaps the charm) that accompanies physical watercolors are absent in their digital counterpart. While making these pieces, I felt almost like I was being deceptive, though not necessarily in a bad way (take from that what you will).
What follows are the pieces I've made this past week or so. All were made in Photoshop with Kyle T. Webster's wonderful watercolor brush set.
"In Search of Context"
I have a tendency to be heavy handed, leading to too busy, well... everything. I tried to actively combat that impulse as best I could while iterating over this piece.
"Quiet."
"Smoke & Mirrors"
As a bonus, here's a "real" watercolor piece I did recently as well.