For those of you who don’t know me. Hi. My name is Abigail and, as they say, I’m a ‘starving artist’. I love photography, painting, dancing, traveling, star gazing, sipping coffee in the morning and taking long walks in nature. As of February, 2019, I live full-time in a tiny home on wheels with my wife Natalie. We’ve been traveling for almost 15 months and after crossing coasts and countries, we’re settling into our new life on the road.
In order to embark on this new nomadic lifestyle, I had to give up a successful photography studio in Charleston, SC. It took years for me to grow my business and have a reliable income directly from my photography so it was a difficult, scary, but necessary, decision to let it all go. But this doesn’t mean I’m done shooting. I take my passions with me wherever I go and I’m finding new ways to create and grow as an artist.
One way I keep creating on the road is by taking self-portraits.
I’ve always enjoyed shooting self-portraits. Not in the sense that oh-I’m-so-vain, I need to see a bajillion pictures of my cute face… no. I look up to artists photographers like Cindy Sherman who subtly transformed herself in every picture to portray a different expression. Not every picture is about looking beautiful. It’s about baring the soul and showing different sides of yourself or of humanity.
I’ve also always loved classical art, especially the impressionist, think Degas, Renoir, Cassatt. Every single one has made paintings of nude figures. Studying the nude figure is an important part of an artists’ life. I understand photography to be a branch of art, so studying the nude in photo-form came naturally to me. I began taking portraits of myself in the nude, quietly studying the shapes and curvatures of my figure. At first most of this took place in my studio in Charleston. When I hit the road, I began to think how interesting it could be to keep making these portraits but out in natural landscapes. I put my thoughts to action and began creating, using my body as art. It just felt right. After seeing the images I created, I knew I had to do more. The series had begun, but it felt wrong to let these images just sit around on my computer, they had to be shared!
On January 1st, 2020 I publically launched this new series: Abigail’s Artful Nudes.