Another artist who paints abstract and figurative art to beautiful effect, I found Erin Ashley‘s work, as I sometimes do, via Pinterest. She lives in Florida with her husband and two children.

I relate to the way she works, and aspire to the outcome!

I begin my work without any preconceived ideas at all what the finished work is going to look like. I like the idea of each painting being a journey, ending at a beautiful destination. My paintings are made with lots of colour and textures, bringing out the old with the new.

So much gorgeous texture and layering, and I love the colour combinations too. I see familiar elements in there – drips, numbers, collage, scratched and scribbled areas, stamps and stencils.

This one has such beautiful colours, it totally inspires me to try something similar. {Still hankering to create something light and soft.}

Erin is also self taught. It’s becoming more and more clear to me that there is no need to have pieces of paper and years of official study under your belt in order to ‘succeed’ {whatever that means} as an artist. I wouldn’t be able to tell whether she had trained or not, looking at these paintings, and it wouldn’t matter anyway. That is not {before I evoke indignation} to say that formally studying art has no value. Just not necessarily to me.

I love everything about this piece; the composition within the outline, the colours, the softened edges, the patches of detail against areas of loose shape and colour. The one below too.

Erin has had a lot of work published and appears to be quite well known, although she is new to me.

Ach, look at this ~ beautiful colours, fab composition, simplified but so thoughtful. Makes me think of an angel.

This is another of my favourites. I’m sure you can’t guess why. It’s luminous!

You can buy prints of her work, and be inspired by many many more examples of it in her Imagekind shop.