Alicia Philley
Alicia Philley is a Texas-born abstract artist who has lived and worked in Austin for more than a decade. She completed the BFA painting program at New York City’s Hunter College in 2005. Studying there with painting professors like Gabriele Evertz and Emily Mason expanded her understanding of the ways in which color and line can create meaning.
Fascinated by the experience of sight, Philley uses bright hues, reflective acrylic paints, and undulating lines to document the constantly moving and shifting world around us. She has developed an abstract language steeped in color theory and the tools of Op Art to tell personal, yet simultaneously universal, stories of the healing power of nature. Her work is also heavily influenced by time spent in the nature around Austin, its greenbelts, creeks and especially her own yard.
Process and content are often intimately connected in her paintings. For example, the shift to painting on wood panels solved a problem of how to control masking tape when making curving, sharp-edged lines. The natural grainline of those panels soon became an integral part of the painting, a way to give nature an even greater voice in the overall work.
Philley also holds a BA in journalism from Southern Methodist University and her first career as a writer and editor set the stage for her creative path: Always looking to the world around her for a narrative. She is a founding member of the artist group Ingrained ATX, her paintings were selected for the 2020 “Texas Now” exhibition in Fort Worth, and she shows regularly in Texas and New York galleries. Her work is owned by Austin-based corporations as well as private collectors around the US, Spain, and Germany.
