I paint from states of deep attention. Not what I see, but how it feels to move through the world fully present.

My current work began on a bike, riding through nature. I wasn't trying to capture landscape. I was translating the experience: cadence and heart rate, wind on skin, the way peripheral vision blurs when effort gives way to rhythm, how the environment dissolves into sensation when body and mind sync up.

As the work evolved, that visual language turned inward. The paintings became less about the bike rides and more about flow as a way of being. That felt sense of interconnection, of belonging to something larger.

I work slowly, letting images accumulate through multiple layers of paint. The paintings are built through repetition and layered transparency. There's no focal point, no hierarchy. Everything participates equally, the way it does in flow.

The leaf forms reference nature and the individual, but together they're about the collective, about interdependence. Meaning isn't imposed; it surfaces through the process.

These paintings aren't meant to be decoded. They're meant to be entered. They ask you to stay, to move with them, to notice what happens when you let your attention soften and distribute across the whole field.

The work comes from a lineage of pattern-based abstraction and the intuitive mark-making of abstract expressionism, but it stays rooted in the body, in movement, in sustained attention to being alive and connected.

Biography

Kristen Phillips is an artist based in Bend, Oregon. She holds a BFA in Visual Communication and a BA in Art History from Northern Arizona University, and has pursued additional study at the Honolulu Academy of Art, the Art Students League of New York, and the New York School of the Arts.

In addition to painting, Phillips is a cycling coach specializing in sustainable performance and longevity.

I write about art and creative process.
Read my writing on Substack

I share guided meditations.
Listen on Insight Timer