Day 82/100: Audrey Phillips
Encouraging a Central Florida Abstract Painter whose Work Dances with Intuition and Visual Dynamism
For my 100 Days of Encouragement Project, I’m celebrating Audrey Phillips — a Central Florida painter whose creative journey has taken her from trauma to integration.
Audrey was born in rural Mississippi, where she grew up hearing stories of lynchings and a traveling electric chair. These dark traumas of our history made a deep impression on her before her family moved to the Florida Panhandle.
The transition from those stories of injustice to the white sand beaches of Florida felt like walking into a bright light — a better place. The extremes of light and dark, within her family and between her experiences in the South, have colored her vision of the world and affected her art-making.
She graduated with a BFA from the University of Florida and went on to become an award-winning creative art director. But a life-altering tragedy changed the trajectory of Audrey’s life. Her mother was murdered. And in the resulting grief and need to re-evaluate her life, Audrey decided to take on small group of clients and spend more time studying and developing her practices of yoga and meditation.
In her healing journey, Audrey created expressive art, visual journals, and intuitive explorations of her loss. Some of her early work included raw, strangely abstracted faces. As she continued to heal, her intuitive abstract painting style emerged.
When she encounters a blank canvas, Audrey begins with a sense of playfulness, often without any attachment to a specific outcome. Her joy comes from embracing the unknown, and committing to the journey with this particular piece.
She describes her process like a relationship. One mark invites another, in a call-and-response kind of rhythm. In the beginning of a painting, the mark-making might happen quickly, with dynamic, explosive energy. As the layers develop, the process slows, and her time spent listening to the painting becomes even more rich and nuanced.
In some ways, Audrey knows that she’s standing on the shoulder of women artists who have gone before her, like Joan Mitchell and Cecily Brown. From Mitchell, she has garnered an appreciation for the power of staying true to herself and not working for anyone else’s approval. From Brown, she gained the freedom to work into the mysterious spaces between the real and the abstract in her paintings.
You can see the influence of nature in her work — from the beautiful colors to the organic shapes and forms, you often get the sense that you are entering a secret garden or being beckoned by the sea. Growing up, she loved swimming in the waters of the Gulf of Mexico. She would suspend herself underwater and enter an otherworldly reality — both beautiful and blurred, at once solitary and resonant with all the other creatures of the sea.
Today, she says that her studio practice mimics this childhood experience. The painting process itself is a similar transcendent space. She taps into her senses, tunes into the experiences of the moment, and she creates a visual language that pushes beyond representation alone, while drawing from her ongoing perceptions of nature.
Audrey has exhibited in solo and group shows in Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, Minnesota, Michigan, California, Texas, New Mexico and New York. Her work is can be found in corporate and private collection in the United States and internationally. And in 2019, 54 of her paintings were acquired by the University of Tampa for permanent installation in their newly renovated Southard Family Building.
In addition, she offers periodic in-person workshops, as well as art partnership mentoring opportunities.
How You Can Be an Encouragement
Please check out Audrey’s offerings on Instagram and her website, follow her, and send her some encouragement today by commenting on one of her posts or sending her a direct message.
Instagram: @audreyphillipsart
Website: www.audreyphillips.com
© Audrey Phillips, from her “Impermanence” Solo Exhibit
