The Artist

Bio

Heather Dawn Batchelor is a contemporary abstract painter whose work is shaped by lived experience, place, and endurance.  Batchelor lives and works between Florida and the Midwest. Her practice is grounded in disciplined studio routines and shaped by a life structured by faith, responsibility, and observation, alongside moments of rupture, loss, awe, and renewal.

Her paintings are not depictions of landscape, but records of what it feels like to live through events within a place. Memory, emotion, and movement accumulate through layered paint, gesture, and return. Each work becomes evidence of an event — a moment where experience passed through the body and was given form.

Batchelor’s work has been exhibited and collected in the United States and internationally. 

Artist Statement

My paintings begin the same way my life does — with structure and grounding. I build a foundation, then release whatever 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 doesn’t have to be pretty — it has 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 all pass through the body before they can be understood. Painting is where those experiences take form. Each work becomes evidence of an event — a physical record of emotion, memory, and movement held in paint.

Place plays a central role in my work, not as scenery, but as lived context. The landscapes I walk through, return to, and remain within carry memory and imprint themselves over time. When I paint, those places re-emerge as layered expressions of what it felt like to live there during a particular season. Nature, in all its wildness, is not calming because it is gentle, but because it reveals a greater force holding complexity together.

On the surface, my paintings may appear explosive, uncontained, and unpredictable. Beneath that movement is intention, return, and balance. The work reflects the human process of living through events — allowing chaos, waiting, and then shaping meaning from what remains.

The work invites the viewer to do the same.