Betsy Eby’s Fire Works

Blowtorched canvases evoke the rhythm and flow of nature

“Artists are always starved for space, time, and light, and the South gives you all of that,” says the painter Betsy Eby, an Oregon native who now calls Columbus, Georgia, home.

Eby—whose glossy canvases might bring to mind a swirl of windswept leaves or a scattering of songbirds—revels in the space afforded by her artist’s studio in a century-old cotton mill on the edge of downtown. The sprawling, open-air layout is perfectly suited to creating the kind of vast nature-based abstractions for which Eby has become known.