Wild gardens, remembered in paint.

heatherabe.org began in 2014 as a tiny blog from my kitchen table — photos of sketchbooks, seed packets and failed glazes. Today it’s my studio home: archive, shop journal and garden diary.

My work sits between abstraction and botany. I don’t paint flowers to decorate — I paint them to remember. Blackberry brambles from childhood summers, my grandmother’s dahlias, the weeds cracking through Portland sidewalks. Each canvas is layered like soil: natural inks, acrylic, gouache, stitched thread, sometimes ash and rainwater.

“Heather’s paintings feel like walking through a garden at dusk — familiar, a little wild, completely alive.” — Studio Visit Magazine, 2025