Ashley Taraban is a visual artist and researcher whose works speak of science, spirit, and myth. Through the medium of oil painting, she creates portals into the living intelligence of the natural world — places where light, water, energy, and matter seem to fold into one another, inviting viewers into a quiet encounter with both the seen and the unseen worlds of existence.

Raised amid the forests and waters of the Pacific Northwest, Ashley’s lifelong connection to the ocean, the night sky, and the wild places of this earth form the root system of her practice. Travel has deepened this devotion: from the Amazon rainforest of Brazil to the volcanic cliffs of Maui, trekking along the Inka Trail in Peru to long stays in Italy and Kenya, she has sought landscapes where awe naturally arises. Her work begins in these moments of wonder — stargazing under a canopy of black, watching tidal flows carve shifting thresholds in sand, tracing the architectures of light — and extends them into visual form.

Symbols recur across her canvases: suns and moons, particles and tidal lines. Circles appear as meditations on perfection and completion, while abstracted figure-forms speak to the spirit in its mutable, eternal state. Her paintings are less depictions than invitations imagining other worlds we have access to.

Ashley’s process merges rigorous research with intuitive creation. She is fascinated by cosmology, physics, and the human drive to codify the mysteries of existence — whether through scientific discovery or ancient myth. For her, painting is a way of tracing the “codes of creation,” making visible the invisible architectures that hold life together. Light, in particular, has become a central inquiry: both as a physical phenomenon and a metaphor, the bridge between energy and matter.

In Ashley’s paintings, vast forces converge in silence. Acting as portals — inviting the viewer to remember their place within a living, luminous cosmos.