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Artist in residence

Avon Waters

Pastel/oil/drawing 📍 Building A · Studio LH 3 works
Avon Waters
About

Meet Avon Waters

Pastel is at the center of Avon Waters’ practice, with oil and drawing supporting a studio process built from preliminary sketches, plein air studies, nature observation, and photo references. Working from rural north central Indiana roots and a long relationship with the landscape, he makes paintings that hover between representation and abstraction, often focusing less on the object itself than on the air, space, and atmosphere around it.

His work grows out of a lifelong studio habit that began in childhood, later shaped by fine art study at Indiana University and an MA from Ball State University. Waters’ paintings have toured galleries and museums and appear regularly in national and international juried exhibitions. He also shares process and encouragement with other artists through YouTube and founded ArtNature Consortium. He lives in Indianapolis with his wife, Doris, and their cat, and works from a studio in Building A.
Featured work
Space Between Wooded Lots

I try to paint the air around a thing more than the thing itself. My art dances on the knife’s edge between representationalism and abstraction. I let the painting lead me: it decides which side of the knife’s blade it falls. Surface, layering, and the physical processes I use varies from painting to painting because I am always experimenting with tools, materials and techniques.

Drawn mostly to landscapes, my interest in conservation pushes me toward making landscapes that I want to escape into —but they do not exist. Inspired by observations and plein air studies, I want these made up spaces to process a fragility that humans want to enter but fear they might break or destroy what is there.

My atmospheres are informed by American Tonalism, my spacial planes and color fields are from Mark Rothko, my unique perspectives of overlapping woodlands and skies by Brian Rutenberg, my color by Wolf Kahn, and the simplicity of the constructed space comes from Maurice Shapiro, to name a few.


— Avon Waters
Avon Explains His Art

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Illustration of the Wapahani Art Center building row