Mab Graves

"This piece was created in the aftershock of a tragic loss in my life. My dad had died suddenly and unexpectedly, and everything felt broken.

"I didn’t paint for months, and I was honestly almost scared to try. I had so many feelings and emotions that I needed to unbottle. I sat down at my canvas and just relaxed - letting my mind release and wind itself around the memories of loss, then I let the brush take over. This piece is about the place beyond tears: sadness so present that your skin and hair hurts. It’s about sleepless nights that smother time and duplicate. Those feelings are terrifying and precious to me. Those feelings are important to my human story and I wanted to find a way to express them and record them. Those feelings created a whole new scale for what pain means to me, and I always want to maintain that perspective. It makes the small stuff truly unsweatable." – Mab Graves

Read our exclusive interview at News.1xRUN.com!

Mab Graves is a Contemporary Pop-Surrealist artist and illustrator living and painting in a converted 1800’s tavern in a small corner of the dusty American Midwest.

A self-taught artist, her work is inspired deeply by fairy tales and old classic literature. She adores narrative.  She blames this on her parents who unrelentingly read aloud to her and her three sisters as small, impressionable children.

Mab’s passion for creation has been an overwhelming obsession since she could grip a crayon, at about the age of 6 months. She spent her childhood and teen years adoring graphite and pen mediums (but being very suspicious of paints) until she discovered painting in early 2009, and then it was all over.  She currently lives, works and dreams in Indianapolis, IN.