My artwork comes from a life spent paying attention in a few particular places.

On mountain bike singletrack, where flow isn't a concept but a survival skill, and where the forms I paint first showed me how they move.

In the relationships with people I love, where I learned that a whole doesn’t have one center, and never stops rearranging itself.

In stillness and silence, at the threshold between waking and dreaming, where images arrive on their own.

  • I paint because some knowledge arrives visually, and painting is how I communicate what words cannot say. Each painting begins with a question or a pull I can't always name.

    The forms are organic: leaves, stones, the lace-like structure that holds them together. They repeat and gather until the surface reaches a density that finds its own balance. I work intuitively and carefully, leaving some imperfections on purpose.

    There is no center, no hierarchy. Each part participates equally in the whole. Your eye keeps moving, finding something new each time. That is intentional.

    The paintings hold marks and tension that arrived without thinking and were allowed to stay. That's where I find the most honest work, in what came through before the editing mind arrived.

  • Kristen Phillips is an abstract painter based in Bend, Oregon. Her work explores relational structure, interdependence, and non-hierarchical composition through layered organic forms that gather into dense, interwoven fields.

    She holds a BFA in Visual Communication and a BA in Art History from Northern Arizona University, with additional study at the Honolulu Academy of Art, the Art Students League of New York, and the New York School of the Arts.

    Phillips writes and teaches about modern abstraction. Her work is grounded in art history and a belief that making art changes the person who makes it. She teaches in person and online, helping people find their own way into abstract painting. Outside the studio, she spends time with her family on the trails and rivers of Central Oregon, where the experiences that drive the artwork begin.

  • For all inquiries please reach out directly at kristenphillips.art@gmail.com