Camellia Butterfield
Chattanooga, Tennessee
Camellia Butterfield is a painter of internal climates who navigates the vastness of human experience through the unspoken dialogue of the canvas.
Message
Camellia Butterfield is a Chattanooga-based abstract artist who explores the nuance of her mediums and the intuitive language of color. While her background in Interior Design from the University of Alabama gave her an early eye for how a canvas commands a space, her current work is driven by something much more personal. As a full-time mother navigating the weight of the world’s wonders and its problems, Camellia uses her studio as a place to decompress and interrogate the friction she feels between her external roles and her internal life.
Her practice has evolved into a form of emotional cartography. Instead of following a rigid plan, she relies on an internal compass and leans into the unknown to see what the paint might reveal. Much of this is influenced by the Tennessee landscape around her. The shift of seasonal light, the way shadows dance in the breeze, and the quiet textures found in moments of stillness all seep into her subconscious. These observations eventually find their way onto the canvas through a palette of earthy tones and organic movement.
Working primarily with acrylics, oil pastels, and chalk, Camellia layers her materials to mirror the weight of the human experience. Her debut collection, Threads of Solace: Layers of Grief, was a deeply personal exploration of loss and the phases of healing. She is currently developing a new body of work titled Under My Skin, which dissects the contradictory emotions that live within the body. Whether she is navigating grief or the duality of our modern climate, her paintings serve as visual pauses. They are tactile spaces that invite the viewer to slow down and rediscover a sense of stillness.
Statement
I am a painter of internal climates. My work explores the vastness of what the human body can carry, from the heavy layers of grief to the luminous breath of healing. I have traded rigid planning for an internal compass, a process of leaning into the unknown to see what the paint might reveal. By pairing the nuance of my mediums with the intuitive language of color, I translate the emotions we cannot always name but can deeply feel.
I am drawn to the way a specific hue can hold a memory or how a textured surface can mirror the friction of our inner lives. For me, a painting is not a static image. It is a living dialogue between the weight of experience and the movement of the brush. My recent work in Threads of Solace: Layers of Grief allowed me to process these shifts in real time, while my current explorations for Under My Skin look at the contradictory tensions we hold within our bodies.
These works function as visual pauses. They offer tactile, wordless spaces that invite a viewer to step outside their external noise and rediscover the resonance of stillness. By translating the raw energy of the spirit into the physical landscape of the canvas, I seek to reveal the quiet commonality of our internal lives. My hope is that these layers offer more than just a reflection because they are an invitation to feel, to be seen, and to find solace in an increasingly bewildering world.