Abstract Painting for Personal Empowerment
Deb Chaney is a contemporary abstract artist passionate about the relationship between art and healing. Her layered mixed media work is inspired by her inner spiritual journey to personal empowerment. In this talk, she will share specific approaches, practices, and mindsets of her painting process that she hopes will inspire you to see both painting and life from a new perspective.
“We are all on a personal healing journey,” she says, “just that many of us are not aware of it—yet.” Chaney has experienced an inordinate amount of tragedy in her life, including, child loss, divorce, and depression. She became an abstract painter out of a visceral need to create after seeing other abstract art. “Because the outside world has in the past been a place of pain, making art was a way I found to feel good. Over the years, I began to realize that my art practice was, in fact, healing for me, guiding me back to my true self.”
Chaney considers a blank canvas to be one of the most exciting things life has to offer. Her creative process speaks to patience and persistence: she spends hours, days, and sometimes months applying and taking away layers of mixed media such as acrylic paints, sand, polymer mediums, oil sticks, pastels, collage, spray paint, and pencil crayon. She will show images of her large-scale textured paintings during the talk, including her all-time favourite piece Serenity (pictured above).
About the artist
Deb Chaney is a contemporary abstract artist who was recently selected to install a large-scale outdoor public tile artwork in Vancouver. She has been named twice in local media as one of the top ten contemporary artists to watch. Her artwork is represented by galleries in Vancouver and Los Angeles as and has been featured in RainMaker Films, Style at Home magazine, and The Georgia Strait. Her work is held in collection by the Hilton Hotel and Bosa Properties, among other corporate and private collectors worldwide.