Love Is Alive at The Painting Center features new work by Jamie Powell, whose experimental approach redefines the boundaries of painting through a tactile and process-driven practice. Drawing from her Appalachian background and a personal history steeped in resourcefulness, Powell transforms raw canvas through dyeing, braiding, weaving, stitching, and sculpting. The resulting pieces have a dimensional, fabric-like presence, evoking both the handmade and the ephemeral.
In this series, Powell turns her focus to flower-inspired forms, drawing on the symbolism and emotional resonance of floral imagery. For her, flowers are tied to moments of love, grief, and celebration—gestures that mark the passage of life. These pieces act as material tributes to those emotions, shaped by an admiration for nature’s inventiveness and vitality.
Her work reflects a reverence for physical process, as well as a quiet intensity rooted in personal and cultural memory. With layered surfaces and organic shapes, the pieces suggest both vulnerability and strength. Powell’s practice carries forward traditions of mending and reworking, while pushing abstraction into new, sensorial territory.
