Embrace the unexpected.
Amy Townsend never knows where the next brush stroke will take her. She starts working on one of her abstract pieces and allows the colors, the shapes and her own thoughts to lead the way.
That’s what keeps her creative spirit pushing forward.
“Each one is reacting to what came before,” she said. “In my mind, it’s all very deterministic. Nothing is there except what came before. I start at a point, and things build off of that, from what is instinctive to me.”
Townsend brings a collection of her various works to the Southside Art League’s Off Broadway Gallery in the month of June. Featuring a variety of approaches, from pencil drawings to realistic portraits to vividly colored abstracts, the exhibition is titled “These Things Happen.”
Her hope is that people find the beauty that she had discovered in the creative process.
“I’m hoping that people dream into them a little bit,” she said. “I try to make my works calming and peaceful, and draw you into a kind of a heaven that you see and feel.”
Finding an outlet for her creativity has never been an issue for Townsend. But throughout most of her life, it was in something outside visual art.
Music had always been her primary focus, starting as a child playing the cello before moving on to the guitar and the bass guitar.
“I’ve always just been really involved in music. I had done some things with art, but really, it’s been in the last three years that reawakened my interest in it,” she said. “Now, I just can’t stop.”
The rediscovery of Townsend’s artistic talent was fed by her desire to capture the sublime and majestic, then filtering it through her own experience.
“I’ve always been struck by beauty — looking at something and really thinking that it’s beautiful,” she said. “So one of the things I tried to do when I first started taking art seriously was to find things I liked to look at, and try to capture them somehow.”
Townsend initially started drawing black-and-white pieces with pencil, before moving to colored pencil. She honed her skills feeling out a subject, using the physical act of drawing to explore its complexities.
As she played with pastels, her work received attention from the people she showed them to. Friends asked her to create work for them.
For the first time, she had the sense that her art had an audience.
“Wow, people actually liked what I was doing,” she said. “I was getting really good comments.”
Then, it was as if someone flipped a switch. Townsend woke up on New Year’s Day this year and decided to try something completely new.
She had focused almost all of her work up to this point on realism. But with the start of a new year, she focused on the other side of the artistic spectrum — abstract art.
“I had a piece of paper, put it on the drawing board, but didn’t know what I wanted it to be,” she said. “I decided to put a mark on a page, and see what happened. I put a color on, then tried another color, and the next thing you know, I’d filled up the whole page with swirling patterns.”
The advantage of abstract work is that it allows Townsend to delve into the full range of colors. Making her work as colorful as possible helps draw the eye in and ultimately captures people’s interests, she said.
Compared to realistic works, the creative process is markedly different.
“When I do something realistic, like a portrait, I’m always working from a photograph,” she said. “With these improvised works, I’m not looking at anything, just on the inside of my mind. I’m drawing my thoughts and meditating through different things as I go.”
“These Things Happen” will feature all different kinds of Townsend’s art, with an emphasis on abstract art. The exhibition takes its name from the title of one of her pieces, which features an array of multicolored points.
She decided that the idea of her art building piece by piece was a good theme for the overall show.
“I’m trying to draw the beauty that I feel around me or inside me, and that’s what comes from that,” she said. “These things come up from that.”
The exhibition will be hanging at the Southside Art League through June 26.
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“These Things Happen”
What: An exhibition of work from artist Amy Townsend, featuring pencil drawings, pastels and abstract paintings.
Where: Southside Art League Off Broadway Gallery, 299 E. Broadway St., Greenwood
When: Through June 26
Gallery hours: 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. Wednesday through Saturday. Closed Sunday, Monday and Tuesday.
Reception: A public reception will be held from 6 to 8 p.m. Friday at the gallery.
Information: southsideartleague.org
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