My name is Abigail Broadwater, and I am a painter. I create pieces to heal myself and my inner child.

I paint to ground myself. Through my art, I hope to show the progress/decline of my mental health from childhood to budding adulthood. I want to do this as a way to cope with this illness and to maybe be able to understand it and myself better. I also want to be able to show the viewer that it is okay to deal with this too. Art is my therapy, and I only hope it shows through to the viewer.

Looking back, what advice would you give yourself?

Trust yourself, and definitely trust the process. I spent a lot of my time questioning my ideas/ questioning my art worth, but once I found my niche it all came so easily.

 My favorite A+D memory is definitely late night studio nights, especially the night before critiques. As a painting + drawing community, we have experienced each other as tired, as inspired, and as fast as we ever have before in normal studios. Seeing your peers in this way and having them see you at 2 am creates such a strong bond that you never thought I'd make.

Advanced Painting! Prof K. will always be one of my favorite teachers, but his advanced painting class really helps mold you into what kind of artist you want to be. It allows you to explore different types of subject matter you're interested in, allows you to explore different mediums, and somewhere at the end you combine all the experiments together to get what you love most about painting.

What moment, project, and/or critique in your Art + Design career at AU has been pivotal to who you are as an artist or creator?

This differs for all artists, but my moment was the last semester of senior year. I had been struggling with the technical side of my paintings, but something clicked for me this semester. I had been trying to capture realism for a while, but finally reached that point in my art.

I am currently planning on proceeding to graduate school. I hope to attain an MFA in studio art which will hopefully lead me into the professional teaching world.

I hope my work makes an impact on the self-conscious/ mental health world. I have always struggled with my mental health/ my body positivity and I express these struggles through my art.

For the senior show, I am doing dual portraits of myself, from 22 years old to 10 years old. I have combined these two ages onto one canvas, creating a dueling depiction of me. I have been using red variants of oil paint to create these pieces. They are differing in size, but all on canvas. I have decided to choose a picture of my older self (when my mental health has gone downhill) and a picture of my youngest self (when I can remember myself happy and unbothered). Giving these portraits double heads creates the illusion that although I wish to get rid of these versions of myself, they are always with me. My goal is to work on mending these relationships with myself and hope to express my trouble through my pieces!