Artist's Statement

Libby Curtis Webb is a contemporary abstract artist based in Somerville, Massachusetts. Her work emerges from a long-standing engagement with photography, travel, and the study of composition.

Since adolescence, Webb has photographed extensively while traveling—drawn not to spectacle, but to structure, light, and spatial tension. Street art, architectural lines, human gesture, and fleeting moments of alignment became early studies in framing and focal balance. She was less interested in perfect focus than in the relationship between elements: softness against geometry, gesture against structure, presence within space.

That compositional instinct continues to shape her studio practice. Rather than depicting specific scenes, she distills the spatial and atmospheric relationships she once captured through a lens into layered abstractions.

Working primarily with inks, concentrated and baked watercolors, dyes, and water-based pigments, Webb builds surfaces through staining, absorption, and revision. Pigment spreads, settles, and interacts unpredictably; edges dissolve; forms emerge and recede. Each painting evolves gradually, balancing structure and release.

Underlying the work is a lived belief in interconnection and impermanence. Meaning arises not from isolated forms but from the relationships between them—between color fields, between tension and openness, between viewer and surface. The paintings invite sustained looking and offer what she describes as “soft places to land.”

Before returning fully to her studio practice, Webb held senior leadership roles in digital product strategy and user experience design, leading award-winning teams in complex systems environments. That background in structure, discernment, and long-view thinking continues to inform her disciplined approach to composition and process.

She maintains studio spaces in Somerville and in the Sunapee region of New Hampshire, where expansive skies and shifting waterlines further inform her exploration of atmosphere, sanctuary, and relational space.