The Artist
Heather Dawn Batchelor is a contemporary abstract expressionist whose work explores the emotion of place. Living and working between Florida and the Midwest, she moves between distinct landscapes that shape the rhythm, color, and emotional atmosphere of her paintings.
Rather than depicting specific locations, Batchelor translates what it feels like to stand inside them. Through layered paint, gesture, and structure, her work becomes an emotional translation of lived experience where memory, landscape, and presence converge into form.
Her paintings have been exhibited and collected in the United States and internationally.
Artist Statement
Through abstract expressionism, I translate the lived emotional atmosphere of a location, shaped by memory, landscape, and presence, into paint. I am less interested in depicting what a place looks like than in expressing what it feels like to stand inside it.
Each painting begins with structure and grounding. I build a foundation, then release what is present without restraint. I step away, allow time and distance to do their work, and return to respond to what remains, adding clarity where it reveals itself. The work does not need to be pretty. It needs to be true.
I paint what it feels like to live through things and then try to make sense of them. Relationships, loss, disruption, awe, faith, and endurance pass through the body before they can be understood. Painting is where those experiences take form. Each work becomes a physical record of emotion, memory, and movement held in paint.
Place is not scenery in my work. It is lived context.
My process is place based and unfolds over time. Walking through landscapes, observing light, filming, and photographing are integral to the work. They are ways of absorbing rhythm, tension, and stillness before translating them into paint. The paintings emerge from this accumulation of lived attention rather than from a single moment in the studio.
On the surface, the paintings may appear explosive and uncontained. Beneath that movement is intention, return, and balance. The work reflects the human process of living through events, allowing complexity, waiting, and shaping meaning from what remains.
The work invites the viewer to do the same.