bio
Tyler M. Watts is a Pittsburgh-based contemporary abstract painter creating layered mixed media works that explore memory, movement, and the hidden pathways through which internal experience takes form. Combining architectural structure with intuitive mark making, her paintings use recurring symbols, atmospheric color fields, and gestural linework to examine themes of transmission, containment, emotional release, and the tension between material structure and intangible experience.
Working in acrylic, spray paint, pastel, and conte crayon, Watts approaches each canvas as both a constructed space and an active record of internal experience. Influenced by her background in civil engineering, she is drawn to the relationship between order and improvisation—building compositions that feel at once structured, introspective, and open to interpretation.
Her recent exhibitions include Being/Seen at the August Wilson African American Cultural Center and Fruits of Seeing at the Sweetwater Center for the Arts. Her permanent installation, Nourishment, is currently on view at Soil Sisters.
Photo Cred: Majestic Moments
artist statement
My paintings investigate the movement of unseen forces through symbolic space. Working in abstraction, I build visual structures that function as conduits—sites where memory, emotion, spirituality, and embodied experience intersect and become visible.
Using acrylic paint, conte crayon, spray paint, and pastel, I construct layered surfaces that oscillate between atmosphere and architecture. Broad applications of paint establish fields of depth and suspension, while drawn lines, geometric forms, and recurring marks operate as signals, thresholds, and points of transmission. Across the work, these repeated forms become a personal visual language: vessels, portals, channels, and coded figures that suggest both physical bodies and metaphysical systems.
Music plays a central role in my studio process, not as illustration but as vibration—an activating force that informs rhythm, pacing, and emotional register. I approach painting as a receptive and generative act: translating internal frequencies into structures that can hold resonance beyond language.
Rather than describing a fixed narrative, each composition maps a state of passage—between containment and release, silence and eruption, interior memory and external energy. The paintings function as psychic diagrams, inviting viewers to encounter them as spaces of reflection, transmission, and personal interpretation.
Ultimately, my practice is concerned with how intangible experience can be given form: how feeling, spirit, and memory might be organized into signs that are at once deeply private and universally legible.
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