Date: January 5, 2023 | Photography: Rett Peek |
“Find Your Cloud” by Amelia Ray Art
20” x 24” acrylic on gallery-wrapped canvas
By day, Amelia Ray Ferguson works as a nurse practitioner specializing in spine surgeries where the majority of her time is spent in the operating room. When the pandemic began, elective surgeries were put on hold for weeks that turned into months; other than providing telemedicine from home and a few visits to the clinic here and there, she soon felt restless. “I’m such a busy body and needed something to do with my time. So I started painting,” she says.
During Amelia’s first few painting sessions upstairs in a spare bedroom-turned-studio, with a fresh brush in hand and the meandering tunes of a jam band playing in the background, she wasn’t sure what might come of her creations. All she knew is it felt right to put paint to canvas. “I just started putting happy colors down. We were all in such a crazy, uncertain time in life, and I thought, how can I make something that brings joy to other people?”
Amelia’s sense of optimism still shines through her work more than two years later. In “Find Your Cloud,” cotton candy pink and bright periwinkle peek through the fog of baby blues. While her paintings rarely veer from the abstract, she finds inspiration in the landscape around her. She and her husband, Doug, take frequent trips to the Little Red River to visit his mom, and here she snaps pictures for reminders she can return to in the studio. “I take a lot of photos out there, then zoom in on a detail to find a color I love, and that’s what I try to recreate.” See more of Amelia’s work and find out about upcoming shows on Instagram (@ameliaray_art).
Portrait courtesy of Amelia Ray Ferguson
