Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Ashley Rabanal. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Ashley, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Looking back on your career, have you ever worked with a great leader or boss? We’d love to hear about the experience and what you think made them such a great leader.

The best boss I’ve ever had the privilege of working with is one of my current bosses. Michael is the chair of a university art department, and he has helped me grow both as an educator and as an artist. One of the things I enjoy about being an art professor is learning and teaching processes that I wanted to learn when I was an undergraduate student but did not get the chance to. Screen printing is a great example of this. My experience with printmaking as an undergraduate student was limited and did not include screen printing, but I still very much wanted to learn about process at some point. When I was asked to teach an intro printmaking class, I knew I wanted to incorporate screen printing. Michael took the time to teach me the entire process from beginning to end so I could pass that knowledge along to my students and incorporate it into my own practice. As a boss, he is all for helping faculty improve themselves as educators and creatives, and you really can’t ask for a better boss than that.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

Hello everyone! I am both a 2D artist and a college arts educator. I primarily work as a painter and favor using oil paints, although I do use acrylics sometimes. I’ve always been someone that leans more towards creative and artistic modes of expression. I remember filling up sketchbooks as a kid and regularly asking for new ones when I ran out of paper. I had the opportunity to attend Anderson University in South Carolina and earn a BA in arts and then an MFA in Visual Art from Clemson University. During the interim between both degrees, I was a Brandon fellow at the Greenville Center for Creative Arts. My time as a fellow really developed my love for painting and my commitment to pouring time and passion into my work. All three of these major artistic milestones were pivotal to pushing my work and practice to where they are today.

The work I produce is primarily conceptual, although I do take on representational commissions. My conceptual paintings often deal with domestic environments. I examine the domestic through color, saturation, value, and spatial depth. Through these means, I unmake the space to challenge our idealized notions of home and to consider how the perfect home does not exist. Although the depicted spaces are grounded in reality, they are not entirely logical, and they operate as curiously psychological environments. This conceptual focus was initially pretty autobiographical, but I’ve recently been focusing more on spaces and narratives outside of my own daily existence.

What do you think is the goal or mission that drives your creative journey?

I can’t quite narrow down my motivations to one, so I shall share a few. The first is that I strive to regularly be improving and developing my craft, whether that be through reading, observing other art, and continuously making. Through my work, I hope that I’m better able to understand and unpack my own experiences with home environments and domestic relationships, but at the same time hope that my work provides a way for people to also think of their own experiences with domestic spaces.

As an arts professor, I hope that my work to improve myself as an artist translates into helping my students grow and become the best artists they can be. I’m so passionate about working with my students and pouring into their lives and artistic development, and it’s truly exciting to see them make discoveries throughout their respective art journeys.

Contact Info:

• Website: arabanalpaints
• Instagram: rabanalpaints

Image Credits
Sad God