Shapes Upon Shapes: Art by Ashleigh Bartlett
Night Moves, acrylic on canvas
Ashleigh Bartlett is a mixed media artist and painter who builds up shapes upon shapes to create colorful, layered compositions. Ashleigh’s paintings all seem to have distinct, almost anthropomorphic personalities.
Heart Shaped Sunnies, watercolor on paper
Where many of Ashleigh’s older works rely on smooth, layered forms that are completely opaque, more recently the artist has been working with slightly translucent washes of acrylic, creating images that are equally layered, but that allow the viewer to see through the layers into the process of the painting. Ashleigh’s series Night Moves features translucently layered paintings in deep blue and green hues, accented with warmer colors. The paintings in this series look like views into a deep forest at night.
The front page of Ashleigh's website
Ashleigh’s watercolor paintings have a similarly layered effect, though in these works the artist embraces the drippy, runny behavior of the medium and lets it spread across wet pieces of paper, creating spots of color that grow outward and overlap like crystals.
