Imagine conquering established boundaries, seeing no limits, pursuing destiny.  An abstract expressionist, Houston, Texas native and Washington, D.C.-based painter Jacquelyn Flowers creates works that provoke, calling one to draw from the power within.  Inspired by the key figures of abstract expressionism, Flowers developed her style incorporating the fundamentals of abstractionism and allowing intuition and improvisation to create the art.  Flowers’s works are color abstractions exuding energetic gesture in a color field.  The paintings have been collected by art patrons and shown in the Southampton Cultural Arts Center, Walton Gallery, CB Richard Ellis, Hill Center Gallery and private homes.  

 

A graduate of Clark College in Atlanta and Atlanta University Graduate School of Business (both now Clark Atlanta University), prior to pursuing art full time, Flowers worked for nine years as a corporate, commercial and private banker followed by a seven-year stint as a top administrator in city government for the District of Columbia. It was in the summer of 2001 that upon receiving a prophetic word that Flowers took a leap of faith on an artistic career. During that time, she enrolled in classes at the Corcoran College of Art and Design where she studied for over a year learning the fundamentals of painting.  She later met and studied with Atlanta-based artist Louis Delsarte where she focused on “action painting and or gestural abstraction.”  Flowers also participated in a drawing group hosted by D.C.-based artist Lou Stovall where she received weekly feedback on her work.  After leaving her city government position in 2006, Flowers spent the summer in Paris, France immersing herself in the works of the masters.  There she met and developed a professional and personal friendship with Netherlands-based American artist Sam Middleton who critiqued Flowers’s work extensively and whom she credits with instilling the value of respecting your studio and time you spend honing your gift.  Upon returning to Washington, Flowers was mentored by abstract expressionist painter Sam Gilliam.   Gilliam, calling Flowers a colorist, provided regular critiques of her work as well as insight on techniques and paint application.​

 

Understanding the historical context of African Americans in the abstract expressionism movement, Jacquelyn is pursuing abstract art to fulfill a calling and to place a new marker on the face of abstractionism.