ON BEING A PAINTER
a way to remember my life
Ava Obert is a student at the University of Arkansas, receiving her BFA in Painting and a Minor in Art History. Her work discovers adventure through painting, the outdoors, womanhood, memories, and her intimate relationships. Through the lens of being raised in rural Arkansas, she found beauty in the garbage and junky fields in the country and discovers what it means for her to exist and paint alone in them. After years of painting plein air with primarily male mentors, Ava left the creeks and rivers to begin looking inward at her relationship to making and learning from various mentors at the University of Arkansas. She completed a residency at the Civita Castellana School of Painting in Italy in 2017 and at the Mount Gretna School of Art in Pennsylvania. In 2017, Ava was awarded first place in the duck stamp artist contest for Arkansas. In the spring of 2020 she had an exhibition with over 50 pieces in the Arkansas Governor’s Mansion. She has shown in local shows across NWA and Mountain Home, AR.
She attended the Mount Gretna Intensive program in the summer of 2023.
Obert is a part-time plein air instructor at Mount Sequoyah.
HISTORY.
Ava Obert was born in Lebanon, Missouri. Her childhood and adolescence was spent in Mountain Home, Arkansas. She will receive a BFA in Painting and Minor in Art History from the University of Arkansas in 2025.
Ava Obert primarily works with material observed in the outdoors and memories from her life as well as stories her family has passed down in the form of creative writing. Her work embraces several genres but repeatedly returns to working outdoors and with the figure. Most of her work is imagined or completely from direct observation.
