About Abby Short

Artist Bio

Abby Short is a visual artist based in Charleston, South Carolina, and a student at the University of South Carolina in the South Carolina Honors College. She enjoys exploring a variety of art mediums, ranging from drawing to sculpture, but considers herself a painter at heart with a focus on oil painting. In her freshman year of college, Abby began her "Dailies" project to enhance her creative ideas by making a different daily drawing in a Moleskine sketchbook, challenging her to come up with a new idea every day. She often pulls inspiration from these daily drawings and expands them into more finalized works accompanied by short stories she writes, creating a hybrid of media where paint can reach where words cannot, and vice versa.

Artist Statement

The first step I take in making work is coming up with a title. While it may seem like a backward process, I enjoy having a fleeting idea to work toward and create visual work that tells a story.

For this Tiny Gallery, I took the ideas I generated from my “Dailies,” or the work that I have created every day in a small sketchbook for the past 700 days, and pushed the colors and forms I had used to make newer, more refined work. The individual pieces may not relate to one another, but the notion behind how they were made connects them: There’s an emotional truth in the stories we tell ourselves, even if they are purely fiction-based and whimsical.

My collection of work ranges in medium, with a preference for gouache and pastel for faster works and oil for larger, slower works, but they are all connected by that desire to share my inner world through art and language in the hopes that someone can relate to it.