Kristin Ashmore

Kristin Ashmore spent twelve years hand-lettering storefronts and church signs around Asheville, North Carolina, and she likes to point out that not one customer ever asked for a quiet color. That trade taught her to make a surface read from across the street: bold contrast, confident strokes, and paint that holds up to sun and weather. Before the brushes and lettering quills, she earned a BFA in Painting from Western Carolina University. The sign shop is behind her now, but its loudness came along to the easel.

Today Kristin paints barns and ridgelines of the Blue Ridge in an expressionist, painterly style, mixing her colors loud and laying them on thick with steel palette knives over stretched linen. Red barn walls, blazing fields, and layered mountain blues stand up in ridges of oil you can almost feel, and her husband swears the studio smells like a hardware store. Her canvases bring warmth and energy to living rooms, farmhouse kitchens, entryways, and family rooms that want a confident splash of color, and they look just as good anchoring a cabin wall or a sunny home office. Below are Ashmore’s canvases in our shop, ready to hang.