HI, I'M ASHLEY.
I believe that paint is a conduit for touch in a digital world.
I'm a painter, sometimes on fabric, sometimes on walls!
You can find me listening to true crime podcasts, on a ladder, vigorously applying more sunscreen (they don't call Florida the sunshine state for nothing!), ferrying my 5 y/o to and from her extracurriculars, and at least 1-3 sports teams in the Tampa Bay area.
I don't buy into the starving artist ethos and preach passionately about living creatively, with purpose.
I love to learn about EVERYTHING (enneagram 5), and am happiest when I eat a peanut butter waffle each morning.
Nice to meet you!!
Ashley Cassens is a native Floridian who earned her BFA from Florida Southern College in 2006 and an MFA from Florida Atlantic University in 2017. In addition to her Graduate Teaching Assistantship in the MFA program, she has been awarded the Provost Fellowship, two Graduate Advisory Board Grants, a Friedland Grant, a Rothenberger Scholarship, an Ambassador of the Arts Scholarship, and was twice awarded a Women in the Visual Arts Scholarship.
She has exhibited her work at the ARC Gallery in Chicago, The Cornell Museum in Delray Beach, the Box Gallery in West Palm Beach and Palm Beach State College in Palm Beach Gardens, FL. She has studied in workshops with Julian Schnabel and Steven Assael. In 2016 she worked at the Ringling Museum of Art in Sarasota, FL in museum education, furthering her passion for teaching. She is certified to teach Art K-12 and taught K-5 Art for the past five years in the Tampa area.
Her recent portrait paintings juxtapose craft and crushingly lovely figure painting in her favorite medium, oil paint.
In 2022, she quite teaching full time to create custom art. You can find her painting walls and canvas in the Tampa Bay area.
She has since been featured on Daytime on Channel 8, Fox 13 Tampa Bay, and Creative Loafing. Her work has been licensed by Home Goods and has illustrated a children's book, which you can find here.
