About
Hart grew up on a farm, surrounded by fields, woods, and endless sky. With a backpack full of empty jars and Golden Guide books on insects, plants, and birds, she spent her days exploring. Those long hours in nature became her first education — a study in beauty, transience, and the intricate architecture of life.
Wandering more than 1,500 acres of farmland, she developed an intuitive understanding of natural systems — one that feels more rooted in ancient awareness than in our modern world. By the age of ten, she already sensed what science continues to rediscover: the cycles of growth and decay, the vastness of space, the fleeting nature of existence, and the power of life itself.
As a young adult, Hart’s curiosity expanded into art. She spent time in museums and studios, immersed in printmaking and mixed media, before pursuing a career in landscape design and installation — another form of artmaking. Moving earth, setting boulders, building stone paths and garden structures, she shaped spaces where the organic and the constructed meet. A hedge might become a sculpture, a view through a window a framed painting of living color.
Today, Hart brings that same sense of connection to her paintings. Working in oil and charcoal, she creates abstract landscapes that explore the relationship between humanity and nature — a search for harmony, memory, and belonging.
Hart studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the San Francisco Art Institute, learning from Anne Truitt, Vera Berdich, and Ed Paschke, among others. She also studied art history and biology at Northwestern University and has been awarded residencies at Oxbow, the Morris Graves Foundation, Seaside, and the Vermont Studio Center, where she held a fellowship in 2017–18.
Her compositions are strong, her color usage muted but glowing, and everything from tree trunks to leaves to water and air has a heavy, chiseled look with consistent paint application that announces in no uncertain terms that we are looking not at illusory pictures but at solid layers of paint on a flat surface. It may be old-fashioned of me to say it, but that’s what painting is all about.
ALEX CLAYTON, SOUTH SOUND ARTS
There’s a thing you do—that only you do—that evokes something personal and unknowable, but also eternal. Like young you has been looking at the world for millions of years, taking it all in, falling in love with it, and letting it break your heart. I always feel lucky when I see one of your paintings, like I’m seeing love and the ages in a way I’ll never feel again.
BRYAN C. MICKLE, ARTIST, WRITER, FRIEND
