Artist Lois Bryan of Charles Town, West Virginia mixes her photography and digital painting to produce a variety of subject matter.

Recently, Lois has been delving into a more non-figurative approach to her work. The featured painting above, Overgrown Window, hints at architecture via a window frame overgrown with ivy. Below is Lois’ description:

This image was very loosely inspired by one of my own original photos taken in the town of Pavia, Pennsylvania in October of 2008. It was hand-painted, digitally, in Corel Painter with a Wacom tablet, the art pen, and a wide variety of beautiful brushes including the Emergence System from John Derry and brushes from Karen Bonaker.

Lois often pairs her imagery with a descriptive text. Here is what she wrote about this painting:

A broken window in an abandoned building is briefly brightened by trailing colorful autumn leaves.

Along quiet streets in small towns around the world can sometimes be seen buildings that have outlived their original owners and even their purpose. Not much longer for this world, they are often boarded up to to prevent vandalism and quietly await their fate.

But Mother Nature can have other plans. In spring and summer, wildflowers and long silky emerald grasses grace the buildings' foundations and birds nest in the cavities in the old wood. In winter caps of feet-thick snows soften the harsh lines, silvery icicles sometimes as long as your arm sparkle in the sunshine and add mystical beauty. But in autumn ... that's where Mother Nature really outdoes herself. The wild sumac, always the first to turn in Central PA, turns impossible shades of oranges and scarlets and golds, and winds around the old windows in a lover-like embrace while the brilliant greens of the other vines remain vivid.

Like the song says, there truly can be beauty in break down.

Upon a closer viewing, the brushwork becomes an abstract surface roiling with subdued energy.

Emergence brushes excel at creating detail. In the above close-up, Emergence can be seen adding levels of texture that enrich the patina of the painted surface. Lois uses the textural strength of Emergence in her figurative work, as well.

In this canine portrait, Lois employed Emergence to add surface detail and expressive strokes to emphasize the dog’s coat.

You can see more of Lois’s work at her website, lois-bryan.artistwebsites.com.

Emergence is available for purchase here.