My name is Eloise Avery, and I am a 2024 graduate of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, where I majored in painting and printmaking. I was born in New York City and moved to the suburbs at the age of six, where I attended Green Meadow Waldorf School. The Waldorf curriculum nurtured in me a deep love for the arts and encouraged exploration across multiple mediums—fiber, wood, metal, watercolor, and more. Alongside this artistic foundation, I developed a lifelong reverence for nature, which eventually led me to a year-long study of biodynamic agriculture, where I discovered harmony between my creativity and the living rhythms of the earth.
The natural world remains my greatest inspiration, as does the intrinsic connection all human beings share with it. I am fascinated by the tension between longing and fear, distance and closeness, and how these dynamics shape our relationship to one another and the earth. For me, the power of nature mirrors the creative force within us all—destruction and creation intertwined. This duality is central to my process, continually driving me to question and explore.
Many of my paintings arise from memory, sense impressions, and felt experiences of places and moments of communion—with nature, the self, or others. In painting memory, I find a dreamlike state emerges, transporting both myself and the viewer into another realm. Memory brings with it an autobiographical quality; the painting becomes a record that says, this is where I have been, what I have seen and felt—now you are here too. My work lives in this space between memory and dream, where I am inseparable from each brushstroke, carrying both my confidence and uncertainty into the piece.
Most recently, I completed an artist residency at Free Columbia in upstate New York, where I investigated the presence of spiritual events and beings in painting. This project centered on motifs of Christian and mythological origin—the Nativity, the Last Supper, the Great Flood, the Crucifixion, and others. In exploring these subjects, I sought to understand them through my own imagination, to see how my work might capture their magnitude while creating a dialogue with history. These events, charged with mystery and significance, offered me an entry point into painting that is both personal and universal. Through this inquiry, I found new energy and excitement in the possibility that my paintings could contribute their own historical resonance.
Today, spirituality has become a major theme in my work, alongside nature and humankind. I see existence itself as imbued with spiritual matter, and through painting, I seek to honor that truth. As Hilma af Klint wrote, “the spiritual is not separate from the material; they are intertwined.” My work is an attempt to give form to that interconnection—to make visible the unseen threads that bind us to each other, to nature, and to spirit.
