meet Olivia
Hi! I’m Olivia, and I’m a painter and floral designer in Portland, OR. I work in my home studio, and each piece I make is thoughtfully curated by hand-mixed colors.
I grew up in Florida among brackish waters and swamps and developed a deep love for and desire to experience other climates besides the one I felt trapped. Fascinated by the desert, though never having been, and enamored with the Blue Ridge mountains of North Carolina that I frequently visited as a child, I had an entrenched ache to be somewhere else.
Once, at school in Arizona, I lived in a desert that was swallowed by canyons existing without contact with friends, music, or exposure to the outside world. This led me to a pivotal discovery: I was at peace here in the desert. I realized that I had been subconsciously collecting color palettes from my surroundings. I knew that colors are generally controlled by accessory minerals and compounds of iron and organic carbon, and that fascinated me. I made art about it.
Once I returned to Florida again, that ever-persistent need to roam re-emerged, inciting my need to associate and integrate the natural world with art and color- and I learned floral design. I had some unfinished business with color, specifically the colors that I had so keenly observed while living in the desert that I needed to do!
My idea for this art series hit me literally in the middle of the night when I wondered why I hadn’t ever taken the colors that I have felt so inspired by throughout my entire life and organized them on canvas. Why don’t I put the things that have inspired me- mineral formations, topography, volcanic pools, agates- on paper?
An Exploration in Color
Each of us has an innate recognition and desire, an umwelt, for observing the colors of the natural world.
It resonates differently in each of us based on personal experience- whether it is the vibrant ochre & cadmium fall leaves against the icy blue Crater Lake or the sage green & honey colored volcanic hot spring in Yellowstone- I seek to inspire nostalgia and a sense of belonging in my paintings.
Colors have deep emotional ties with each of us, and I want to make the specific colors that we each feel a connection with tangible- I want them almost to feel edible.