Genie Maples

I'm a lyrical colorist specializing in oils. These paintings are emotionally evocative as well as beautiful, inviting attention and introspection. Carefully balanced composition and nuanced color layering make this work both intriguing and comfortable. Clients often remark that their appreciation of their painting grows deeper over time.

I've been painting professionally since 2002 and have sold paintings across the United States and throughout the world, both online and through my Asheville NC studio (currently open to visitors by appointment).

My techniques are idiosyncratic, evolved through thousands of hours of simple but attentive exploration at the easel. My goal is to approach each painting anew, building upon rather than resting upon what I have learned through earlier work.

My education is simply this: Thousands of individually considered and attentive artistic choices built one upon another in the studio.

I am simply a working artist. I do speak about artistic process and experiences informally and I write, but I don't instruct. I firmly believe adopted technique pales in comparison to experience gained through solitary hours building intimacy with materials and internally developed fluency. That groundedness in individuality comes through naked experience. Fluency builds in the actual practice of openminded work -- the attentive questioning and working hours invested.

Most of my influences are relatively mainstream. I particularly appreciate Picasso's boldness, Bonnard's vibrance, Rothko's resolute depth, Mitchell's directness, Diebenkorn's somehow straightforward nuance.

What impresses me in an artist's work is an anchoring in his or her own experience with open-minded exploration of materials, the continuing development of a personal language however transparent or convoluted - honesty, awareness, the turning from the automatic influence-based decisions into something more personal and considered. We all carry our influences with us. The question is whether we sit with them where they lay or move with them somewhere more individual.

contemporary, abstract, expressionism, color, expressionist, modern