BIOGRAPHY

Makayla Thomas is a painter and multidisciplinary artist whose work moves between oil paint, charcoal, and oil pastel. She received her BFA in Art Studio with a concentration in oil painting from the University of Kentucky in 2023.

 

Through disrupted realism, Thomas explores the complexities of femininity, lingering in the space where softness collides with ferocity. Her practice draws from lived emotional experience, transforming them into symbolic landscapes that speak to resilience, defiance, and the unruly pulse beneath the surface of the feminine. Her paintings and drawings explore these concepts through figurative odyssey, experimenting with emotional and cognitive processes amid the gray area that encompasses the distinction between representation and abstraction. Hanging in this limbo, and working within a space that is simultaneously flat and rendered, she finds that there is something compelling to be discovered about the process of apperception, while seeking a central orientation from which balance occurs; thus, the pieces themselves are a visual display of what it feels like to be a woman. 

 

Thomas’s process is defined by subconscious decisions: when to begin, when to end, and when to alter. Through this rotation of beginnings and endings, what results is a sort of palimpsest: layered works of both drawings, underpaintings, and rendered paintings, obscured but still visible.

 

Thomas is currently open for commissions and collaborative projects of any kind.