Collection: Ashley Benton

Ashley is a landscape artist currently residing in Tennessee. She has always felt drawn to the daily changing scenery of the landscape. She began painting landscapes more frequently upon graduating from the University of Mississippi in 2020, focusing primarily on the sky, and how light hits the clouds. Light and movement have always influenced her, but recently, she has been influenced by how a certain place feels, and painting based on that feeling, creating an impressionistic style influenced by Claude Monet.

She works with oil paints mainly due to their slow-drying process. This allows Ashley to slowly work in colors, evaluate, and change the painting as she analyzes. Ashley is especially inspired by nature—particularly moments in a landscape where the light uniquely strikes the scenery. She tends to wait for a piece to dry completely, and then slowly add light layers to certain areas of the landscape to add depth and intentionality.

Her landscapes capture a feeling of that particular place using vibrant colors and wispy brushstrokes often being described as soft, ethereal, and bright. To her, a vast landscape enhances her awareness of her small place in the world—that it is not the scenery that gets to partake in her life, but rather that she has the pleasure of partaking in something much greater than herself. Ashley paints in her backroom studio in Jackson, Mississippi. Her deepest desire as an artist is to bring people together through a shared sense of awe and reverence for the beautiful gifts of nature, time, and human love around us.