shayla maddox - water & light

This type of art, Light Reactive Painting, is totally new to me and I find it captivating! The photos you see here are all the same painting in different types of light. I added the text at the bottom of each painting so you would know the light source in which each photo was taken. NOTE: Click on photos to enlarge

The artist, Shayla Maddox, whose mom is also an artist, has been making art all of her life. She has been painting light reactive paintings for almost four years and has been working as a full-time artist for just over one.

I asked Shayla what inspired her to begin this art form and this was her answer;

“As far as my current style, the truth is, I had a vision about something I just "needed" to create. I hadn’t intended to complete more than one piece, which I did purely as an experiment. As soon as I’d completed it, though, I had a vision to do another, and then another and then another. It became quite addicting and I soon realized that I didn’t want to do anything else.”

Shayla learned her skills through practice, practice, practice. She received some excellent advice from a professional artist who told her to enjoy the process and not worry about making it good. This advice helped Shayla overcome her self-consciousness…a problem many artists face...and enabled her to “create for the sake of creating”.

As you can see in her paintings, Shayla is inspired by the color of light ( which is different not only throughout the day but throughout the seasons) and her love of astronomy…new things constantly being discovered in the universe. She finds creating art that changes colors and appearance, depending on the light which exists around it, to be endlessly fascinating.

Shayla’s paintings can take anywhere from a few weeks for the smaller pieces, to a couple of months for the larger ones. She is an intuitive painter; changing ideas and techniques as she paints; making decisions about her next step “on the fly”.

In addition to her Etsy shop, Shayla sells in galleries on both coasts and local business near her home in Orange County, California. She has a problem, though…her small pieces are selling so quickly on Etsy, she has had trouble keeping enough of her art in stock for the “brick and mortar” stores. As she told me, that’s a “great problem to have”. It’s certainly one I would be delighted with!!

Shayla donates 10% of all the proceeds from her sales to Acres of Love, an organization that provides "forever homes" to children in South Africa who have been stricken with HIV/AIDS or have been orphaned or abandoned.

You can see, and read more about, Shayla’s extraordinary work on her website, blog, and Etsy shop (where you can also purchase her paintings).

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