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Ashley Justice
USA
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"I am going to make everything around me beautiful - that will be my life." -Elsie de Wolfe
Ashley Justice carries a particular kind of energy that is immediately felt in a room and unmistakably present in her work. It is not something she performs or deliberately projects; it radiates outward from a genuine place, shaped by curiosity, warmth, and an unguarded enthusiasm for the world around her. Her paintings, prints, and mixed media pieces carry this same quality, communicating a vitality that viewers often describe as both infectious and grounding. Bold color choices, expressive mark-making, and compositions that balance dynamism with intention speak to a personality that refuses to be contained by convention. The work is joyful without being simple, playful without being frivolous, and consistently anchored in an authentic artistic voice that has only grown more defined with time.
Toxic | Mixed Media
$14000
24x18
They poison our food, water, and even the air we breathe. That which is supposed to nourish our bodies can make now us sick, sometimes becoming deadly. The products we clean with and even put on our skin are contaminated with toxins. Even babies still in the womb are not safe from chemicals and microplastics anymore. What was once safe has become toxic. I envision a world where everyone has access to safe food, water, and air, our existential rights as human beings on this planet.
Two artists have left a particularly notable impression on Ashley's development: Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Hilma af Klint. The emotional directness of Kirchner's color and his willingness to distort and intensify form in service of feeling resonates deeply with Ashley's own approach to painting. She does not replicate his gestures, but she understands his philosophy intuitively, using color not as description but as sensation. The connection to Hilma af Klint operates on a different register entirely. Klint's engagement with the unseen, her belief in sacred geometry and spiritual dimensions beyond ordinary perception, mirrors a sensibility that runs quietly through much of Ashley's recent work. These influences are not imitated but absorbed, filtered through her own experience and recast as something distinctly her own.
The Cycle | Wood Carving
$11000
12x9
We all experience darkness, some more than others. It is part of the human experience, to include pain and sometimes suffering. However, it is important to remember that we are not broken and that there is a season for everything. Spring will always follow winter. The sun will eventually shine again. We must remember and believe that joy and love will visit us again, because it will. This is the cycle of human existence-a balance of sadness and joy, light and dark, misery and ecstasy.
Ashley's earliest body of work belongs firmly within the Pop Art tradition, a movement that suited her ability to synthesize imagery from vastly different visual sources. Rather than working from a single reference or subject, she approached composition as an act of collation, gathering fragments of photographs, cultural imagery, and personal documentation and pressing them into something unified and purposeful. Sometimes a concept would arrive first and she would search for the visual material to match it; other times a photograph she had taken or stumbled upon would ignite the idea entirely. This fluid, source-driven approach produced work with a distinctive graphic energy, layered in meaning and visually immediate. Those early pieces established habits of research and visual thinking that continue to inform her practice today, even as the aesthetic territory has shifted considerably.
"Spring to an artist is like love to a poet."
Over the years, Ashley's work has expanded to encompass both Expressionism and Abstract Art, a natural evolution that grew from her resistance to being confined to a single mode of working. Many artists feel the pressure of consistency, the expectation that a cohesive career requires a fixed style maintained across decades. Ashley has consciously rejected this model. Each piece is treated as an individual inquiry, and the style she brings to it is determined by what the idea demands rather than what an external audience might anticipate. Acrylic and oil painting, collage, printmaking, photography, and mixed media are all active parts of her practice, and she moves between them according to mood and creative necessity. The result is a body of work that is varied in form but coherent in spirit.
The Vision | Oil
$22000
48x36
In 2016, while doing yoga at home I had a vision. I was walking with my husband in the woods but there was another spirit there. I didn’t really understand the meaning at the time, but I painted this vision in Spring of 2019. A few months later I became pregnant with my son, despite having a medical condition that commonly causes infertility. In this image, we are leaving behind the darkness and heading towards the light, surrounded by our ancestors and spirit guides.
Flowers and plants are undoubtedly beautiful and awe-inspiring, a common subject in my work. After looking at flowers under a microscope, I was surprised to discover that they are stunning even at the cellular level. It’s as if entire universes reside in each and every cell. This painting is inspired by a variety of microscopic images of plant cells.
Flora Cells of Springtime | Oil
$22000
48x36
Printmaking entered Ashley's life during her formal fine art studies, where she was introduced to woodcut and intaglio techniques and began to understand the unique demands and rewards of working with pressure, ink, and resistant surfaces. The experience of making an impression, of transferring a carefully carved image onto paper through controlled force, appealed to something in her that painting alone did not fully satisfy. After graduating, she taught herself linocut, drawn to its accessibility and the distinct quality of line it produces. For several years, smaller linocut prints have served as a counterpoint to her larger projects, offering a more contained and meditative creative space. A new series of larger-scale linocut works is currently in development, a return to the medium with expanded ambition and a considerably matured hand.
"I paint that which I am unable to articulate with words. My art is my diary that I share with the world."
"Whenever I'm creating, my subconscious takes over. An inner knowing tells me what color needs to go where, how the pieces should line up. Time seems to freeze when I'm making art; the world disappears. It's as if I'm in a liminal space where nothing exists except my canvas and my heart and soul. I have an intrinsic need to create. I have to get the ideas and my energy out, or else I don't feel like myself. Art is a part of me-it always has been."
When Ashley begins a new painting or mixed media piece, the process starts with something deliberately incomplete: a basic subject, a loose outline, a color palette chosen with care but not rigidity. From that point, intuition takes over as the primary guiding force. She does not sketch out a finished image in advance or arrive at the canvas with a resolved plan; instead, the painting is allowed to develop on its own terms, revealing itself gradually through the accumulation of decisions made entirely in the moment. The finished work often surprises her. Colors shift during the process, shapes emerge that were not anticipated, and the emotional content of the piece frequently diverges from any initial intention. This willingness to surrender control, to trust process over plan, is central to how Ashley understands her own creative identity.
Green Chrysanthemum | Acrylic
$17000
48x36
Green flower blooms are rare in the natural world, making the green chrysanthemum rather unique; it is vibrant and joyful. My wedding bouquet included green chrysanthemums by accident. I had a DIY bohemian wedding, and the first time I made a wedding bouquet was the day before my own wedding. I went to a local grocery store and purchased a variety of flowers; I purchased the flowers that spoke to me that day. Any time I see green chrysanthemums I am reminded of my wedding day, feeling a sense of joy and nostalgia.
Ashley's mixed media practice reflects a strong commitment to material thoughtfulness and environmental awareness. She incorporates bird feathers and fragments of glass found near her home, small offerings left by the natural world that find their way into pieces as both texture and symbol. Recycled and upcycled materials appear throughout her work: resurfaced canvases, tissue paper, cardboard, and pages drawn from pre-owned magazines are all treated as legitimate creative resources rather than compromise materials. Dried leaves and flowers occasionally enter a piece as well, adding an organic fragility that contrasts meaningfully with harder or more structured elements. This approach to material reflects a philosophy about the value embedded in overlooked and discarded things, and a belief that art can be made from whatever the world generously offers.
Between the Trees | Acrylic
$14000
24x18
Everything carries energy, including plants. Sometimes when we touch plants we “see” and/or feel certain colors or images. I made a slightly abstract painting of what I see when I hug my own special oak tree in my backyard.
Ashley's collage practice operates according to its own internal logic, one that differs meaningfully from the open-ended nature of her painting process. In collage, she begins with a more deliberate act of curation, drawing on multiple sources of inspiration to establish a theme, color palette, or compositional direction before the making begins. Central to this practice is a technique she has developed involving magazine pages and a chemical transfer process that allows her to produce custom paper with a particular visual and tactile quality. This material, made entirely by her own hands, becomes the foundation for compositions that carry a handmade specificity impossible to achieve through conventional means. Her photography practice, meanwhile, draws almost exclusively from the natural world, with plants, fruits, and vegetables grown in her own garden or discovered on family nature hikes serving as the primary subjects.
Sometimes whilst photographing or taking video, I capture spirits on camera in the form of light anomalies. I painted a group of angelic spirits that I photographed on December of 2025, from an abstract perspective.
Angelic Spirits 12.22.2025 | Oil
$17000
24x18
"I transfer the beauty I feel onto the canvas."
Heartbeat of the Earth | Mixed Media
$17000
31.5x24
I used to fear the winter. A time of coldness, void of color, sickness, melancholy, and sometimes even death. The new me is learning to flow with the winter and continue along my journey with hope and love. I am focusing on the stillness, the preparation, and being present while enjoying the glimmers that life has to offer. The animals and plants are resting, but the spirit of the earth is still very much alive.
The arc of Ashley's body of work as a whole tells a story that is deeply personal and quietly universal. Earlier pieces confronted themes of depression, pain, and the interior landscape of struggle, and they did so with honesty and without the softening that sentiment might otherwise impose. As the work evolved, those chapters gave way to imagery of vitality, joy, and hard-won hope. The current collection occupies a space of transformation and self-discovery, operating at the threshold between the visible world and the forces that move through it unseen. Ashley is clairsentient, sensitive to the energies of others in ways that exceed ordinary perception, and this sensitivity has become a legitimate creative resource. Shapes and images arrive to her in dreams or in the stillness behind closed eyes, and she translates what she receives into painted form with the quiet confidence of someone who has learned to trust the interior.
“Man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains.” Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
Chains | Etching
$7000
7x5
At the center of everything Ashley makes is a hope that feeling travels. She does not create to document, to impress, or to occupy a particular position within the art historical conversation, though her work does all of these things in its own way. The deeper motivation is simpler and more vulnerable: she wants the joy she experiences in observing beauty, in finding wonder in a feather or a color or an unexpected composition, to pass from her hands into the work and from the work into the viewer. There is something profoundly generous in this aspiration. It asks nothing of the audience except presence and openness, and offers in return a creative world built from intuition, spirit, material intelligence, and an unwavering commitment to the idea that making art is, at its most essential, an act of connection.
Chains, Broken | Etching
$7000
7x5
All around the world, we are slowly waking up. Together we will break the chains placed around us, and together we will build the world as it is supposed to be. Life will no longer be a battle for survival; we will love and grow and thrive-together.
"I feel like Persephone - I made my way back from the underworld."
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