The bright colors and swirls of Carla Reed’s abstract, acrylic floral art sharply deviate from the realistic watercolor portraits and soft nature scenes the artist has created for years.

But that’s the point of the pieces — Reed wanted to approach her art in a radically different way.

“I wanted to free myself of that kind of restraint,” Reed said. “I love color and light, and I just wanted to try something different that was a lot more intuitive, because I was feeling stuck.”

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Reed is a lifelong artist. She took lessons as a child, studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in the ’70s and has continued to create and teach since. She moved to Carbondale in 1996 and dove into the local art scene, eventually opening a studio at Studio for Arts and Works (S.A.W.) and joining Cooper Corner Gallery, now Cooper Gallery. 

“It just feels good to create something,” Reed said. “I’ve met wonderful, lovely people through the process of learning and creating, which is always a benefit.

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“It’s a means to express myself and to play with things that are really fun to me, like paint, clay and all those things,” she added. “The very visceral nature of them, it just gives me a lot of pleasure.”

Reed moved to Rifle in 2019 and now works from her home studio. Her work is available at Midland Arts Company, 101 E. Third St., Rifle. 

“There have been a lot of detours along the way that had to do with being a younger adult with lots of other responsibilities. Now that I’m older…I have a lot more time to dedicate to the work and to try different things without having any interruptions,” Reed said. “The responsibilities of home and family went down, and my free time went up, and so I am able to spend a lot more time exploring my art and where I want to go with it.”

She’s dabbled in many different mediums and styles over the decades, including encaustic, or hot wax, painting, collages, sculptures and printmaking. Watercolor painting has always been her artistic home — but that might now be changing.

“For a while I’ll get on a kick of one type of work or another but the go to, usually, when all is said and done, is back to watercolor, although now I think it might have changed to acrylic,” Reed said. “People expect me to be painting in watercolor because I have done it for so many years.”

It’s been around a year since Reed decided she needed a break from the detailed, hyper-realistic watercolors that became her staple and embraced the new, intuitive style that defines her “Garden Series.”  

“People have said ‘Oh, just looking at this work makes me feel happy,’ and that makes me really happy,” Reed said of her floral pieces. “Doing the work is about happy, bright colors. It seems like what we all need right now is to have something that is uplifting and makes you feel happy.”

Her process is different every time — sometimes Reed starts by scribbling on the canvas with a pencil or chalk, other times she paints the canvas with a dark color first, adding flowers on top.

“I just started making marks on canvas and adding color and shapes and seeing what happened,” Reed said. “It turned out that I wanted to paint flowers, or things that looked like they might be flowers, but it was mainly more about the colors and the shapes and the way the colors work together than it is about whether or not it’s a certain kind of flower. It’s more interpretive and free form.”

Other creatives use the vibrant prints, now licensed to a fabric company, to make quilts and other craft projects.

To Reed, creating art fearlessly is important, and a mindset she encourages her adult beginner students to adopt. 

At home, the traits of a fearless artist are exemplified by her granddaughter, Rosie, who occasionally creates alongside Reed in her home studio. 

“She’s a fearless little artist, as all children are,” Reed said. “As you get older, you get more and more self conscious and afraid to try new things, but she is just right there on board to try anything, and she likes to do things in her own way. If you give her the tools, she’ll do something amazing, so it’s a lot of fun to watch her.

“I think any aspiring artist can learn a lot by watching children and seeing how they approach it,” she added. “It’s just pure imagination.”

One of Reed’s floral works will be featured in the 46th Annual Valley Visual Art Show, presented by Carbondale Arts at The Launchpad, 76 S. Fourth St., Carbondale. The show opens Friday, Jan. 17 and will be on exhibition weekdays 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. through Feb. 20.