Natalie Moffitt: February 2023
Natalie Moffitt's roots are deep in the Western Pennsylvania region, but she spent most of her childhood living in Nairobi, Kenya. She moved back to the US to attend Houghton College, where she graduated with her Bachelors of Fine Arts in 2014. Moffitt has been living in Pittsburgh since 2019, and is currently working out of her home studio in Friendship. She has participated in artist residencies in Kenya, Morocco, and the US, and her work is in private collections around the world.
Moffitt uses color as a tool to create intuitive and emotional abstract paintings. Her work draws from a specific, deeply personal, and ever-growing vocabulary of colors, lines, and methods of mark making that she has been compiling over the past ten years of her practice. She considers her paintings visual streams of consciousness that are heavily influenced by her surroundings, as well as by her day to day emotions, experiences, and memories.
My paintings are like sieves that catch the residue of emotions, experiences, landscapes, memories and dreams, translating them into a new language composed of an expansive and layered personal vocabulary of color and mark making. I make decisions about color and composition intuitively, attempting to achieve a ‘flow state’ during the process of painting that allows for my most honest and authentic subconscious voice to materialize. As a result, my paintings are saturated with tension and emotion. I paint primarily with oil paints for their quality and versatility, but I experiment from time to time with the texture and shape of my painting surfaces, incorporating some collage of found materials to create new dimensions in my work.
