Bloom

Madison Tubbs, MFA 2026, Painting

My practice investigates perception as an embodied, time-based experience. Rather than treating painting as an image, I approach it as a site that models how we encounter color, light, and atmosphere through the body. I question what a painting can hold and how it might function as a space for sensory awareness. In this way, my paintings become a tool for slowing down perception and making visible the instability, indeterminacy, and wonder embedded in lived experience. 

Color is central to this inquiry. Shaped by light and duration, it operates as both a carrier of emotion and a metaphor for perception itself: never fixed, contingent, and shaped by time. Through a stain-based process, pigment moves across the surface until absorption, evaporation, and gravity assert their limits. 

These material thresholds echo perceptual encounters when light shifts and alters our field of vision, producing ephemeral experiences that are immersive and difficult to name. My practice as a painter has taught me how to see, not only through heightened sensitivity to color and light, but as a broader philosophy of attention. I’ve learned that time, commitment, and sustained looking reveal how perception is relational and shaped by circumstance. 

The studio is a site of inquiry where painting becomes a way of thinking. Rather than working toward a fixed outcome, I allow questions to guide the process, responding to what unfolds materially. The paintings are traces of lived moments, grounded in real time and real processes, resisting illusion or simulation. The work invites uncertainty as a generative condition. Each painting becomes a record of looking, a space where perception remains open, provisional, and continually becoming.  



 

Madison Tubbs is a painter living and working in Philadelphia and a second-year MFA candidate at Tyler School of Art and Architecture, Temple University. Her abstract practice explores the perceptual and spatial possibilities of light and color through materially attentive processes. She received her BFA with a minor in Art History from the University of Kansas in 2018. Her work has been exhibited in Brooklyn, NY; Denver and Snowmass Village, CO; Kansas City and Lawrence, KS; and Knoxville, TN. Shaped by her rural upbringing, her work approaches painting as an evolving and active site of inquiry. 

Instagram: @madisontubbs_