Bianca Youngers is a Portland, Oregon-based painter known for her vivid, layered abstracts inspired by dreamlike gardens, botanical forms, and otherworldly undersea escapes. Her work merges emotion, intuition, and bold color to create immersive, textured landscapes that invite viewers into a deeply personal visual language. Artist StatementMy work begins in emotion—an anchoring to this earth and an attempt to loosen the grip of chronic pain on my body. Painting is not a hobby; it’s how I survive. It’s how I stay soft in a hard world.​I create swirling undersea gardens, ethereal blooms, and lush, fern-covered dreamscapes—each one a doorway to another dimension. You only need to part the leaves and step inside. There, color pulses with mystery. Fragrance floats through the air like memory. Bugs might chirp lullabies. Music bends differently.And nothing hurts.​Each painting begins with the background: I mix gesso with pigment to give the canvas a soft, matte grip, creating a hazy, dreamlike base that gently pulls the viewer inward. Then I layer marks and scribbles—often the names of people I love or can’t stop thinking about. That underpainting holds them close. From there, I let my state of mind, the music I’m listening to, and whatever caught my eye in the world that day—light on a leaf, a color combo from someone’s outfit, the shape of seaweed—guide my brush.​These worlds remind me how small we are in the vastness of all that could exist beyond what we know. My paintings are meditations on that unknown—on beauty that might be blooming just out of reach.​I find joy in color, in play, in the wild freedom of the brush. There are no rules here.How do I know a painting is finished? When my body lights up. When I want to flap my hands and thump my feet like my daughter used to do, pretending to live in her doll's sticker book.​Maybe that's what painting with acrylic is for me—a way to live inside the magic, just for a moment. A portal. A place where wonder still rules.