About Linda Hart

A Miami Valley resident for more than 25 years, Linda studied drawing and watercolor as a child on scholarship at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and as an adult at the Dayton Art Institute and Riverbend Art Center. She has had many solo shows, been in many juried shows and won several awards for her work. She is a member of The Contemporary Dayton and The Dayton Society of Artists.

In the last year, Linda started noticing the beauty in crumbling, decaying industrial warehouses and decided to challenge herself to do a body of work with subject matter she was unfamiliar with, to stretch her creativity and grow as an artist. She set out driving around East and West Dayton to take photos and found numerous industrial vignettes often with nature visibly taking over the structures or changing them in beautiful ways.  Chasing Urban Shadows was born from that urge to explore another path in her art.

About her work:

"Chasing Urban Shadows is my most recent body of work and has evolved over the past 18 months into subject matter I adore. I realized one day in early 2021 when viewing a decaying warehouse how beautiful the crumbling exterior wall was with portions of another building still attached from a building that had been torn down next to it. Soon, I started seeing painting vignettes in abandoned buildings all over and began seeking out old warehouses all over Dayton to photograph them as reference material for a series of watercolors.

Once I began working with these images, I realized how perfect watercolor was to capture the drips, rust, striations and textures of these decaying buildings. I also knew I wanted these to be very large watercolors on canvas to do the images justice.

The more time I spent with the photos I took of these buildings, the more possibilities I saw for abstract paintings and was inspired to paint these scenes. I liked the way these images were actually someplace real but also came across as an abstract image for your own interpretation.  I found a beauty in the decay, the same way I had previously found beauty in the flowers I have painted and grown for years. There is hidden beauty everywhere, even in industrial warehouses and train bridge overpasses and you must look a little harder to see it.

For the past 25 years my subject matter has been with a subject I knew intimately; flowers and working with a completely different subject matter recently has been freeing and exhilarating. It has inspired me to paint more and in very different ways and to see the world around me differently. 

Will these aging industrial buildings become even more beautiful as they deteriorate more? I hope I inspire others to wonder the same things while enjoying the images I have painted. I hope I have brought the beauty of what time and nature has done to these buildings to life and others love what they have become as they have evolved in their surroundings."