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 emotional atmosphere of a place, shaped by memory, landscape, and presence, into paint. I am less interested in what a place looks like and more interested in what it feels like to stand inside it.
Color becomes a primary language in my work, carrying movement, tension, and emotion. It holds what cannot be seen but is deeply felt, allowing the internal experience of a place to emerge beyond its physical form.
Each painting begins with structure, a grounding. I build a foundation, then release what is present inside of me without restraint. I step away, allowing time and distance to do their work, and then 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, pain, loss, love, joy, awe, faith. These experiences often move through the body before they can be fully understood. Painting is where they take form. Each work becomes a physical record of place, emotion, memory, and movement held in the paint.
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 a place, its rhythm, tension, and stillness, before translating it into paint. The paintings emerge from this accumulation of lived attention rather than from a single moment in the studio.