Known for her graphite and acrylic works depicting the art of motion while celebrating competition and the human spirit, Heather Blanton is an American painter and photographer living and working in St. Augustine, Fla. Her latest series, “Sports,” depicts a wide range of subjects from golfers in mid-swing to cyclists peddling toward the finish line to hundreds of marathon runners racing to glory.

 

Born in Jacksonville, Fla. in 1973, Blanton studied art at the University of North Florida and The Art Institute of Fort Lauderdale. She spent three years living in New York City exploring hand-manipulated and distressed Polaroid SX-70 film images. As analog film teetered on the edge of extinction, Blanton turned to fine art painting as her next medium. Today, she has created hundreds of large and small sports paintings influenced by Abstract Expressionism and conflicted by a blend of animation and whimsy.

 

“My works are focused on the energy of the race,” Blanton explains of her “Sports” series. “They are easily distinguishable by compositional elements of color and form. By creating dialog between the viewer and the subject matter, this series is a cohesive collection of flat images with a chaotic, pattern-like style where the lines and negative spaces are almost as important as the subject matter.”      

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