Ashley Marie was distraught and angry at God after her sister unexpectedly died. To ease her pain, Marie asked her sister to send her a purple flower, a sign from beyond the veil to let her know she was safe. Several weeks later she got her answer when a purple pansy sprouted from a brick on her front porch. Marie’s paintings haven’t been the same since.

Marie is a metro Detroit-based figurative oil painter whose work sits on the threshold of the spirit realm, where past, present, future, living, and dead converge. Painted mostly in shades of green, Marie’s work captures lush plants, dense forests, and transparent specters as they materialize into physical form.

Marie has been a practicing artist for over 10 years, but her work didn’t always feature apparitions with a green palette. She started off doing abstract expressionist works with charcoal, but that changed following her sister’s death in 2015.

“That was so inexplicably powerful to me in confirming that something is out there greater than us; that there is something beyond us and what we can comprehend,” she says. “Instead of painting abstractly and expressionistically just for aesthetic or purely just for expression, I just felt like I had to start painting something with meaning so that I could give that experience to the world and use my work as a vehicle.”

Marie’s studio is covered in plants. Monstera crowd corners as pothos crawl in front of giant windows and cascade down to the floor. She’s even wearing green during our visit.

“I think the most important thing that I want my audience to take away from my work is to have a self-reflective moment and think about your own thoughts on spirituality.”

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“I feel a deep connection with plants and nature because I feel like it is deeply a part of us and connects us to this world,” she says. “I like plants and flowers so much because I feel like they provide a comfortable environment and connection to God, who created all of this, or the universe, whatever you prefer to believe. There’s just so much beauty and calmness in it.”

Marie is mostly self-taught. She dropped out after one semester at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco because she couldn’t afford it and taught herself how to paint with oils during a Red Bull House of Art residency in 2012. She further developed her technique in realism after working under Chicago-based multidisciplinary artist Carlos Rolón.

Most recently Marie’s shown work in the Atlanta Art Fair in addition to her 2024 solo show, Transcendence, at Ferndale’s M Contemporary Art.

She finds inspiration in theology, quantum physics, and mysticism, which is part of the reason the people in her work are usually transparent. They’re literally see-through. The outline of a woman’s body rests gently atop a bed of garden flowers, her figure slowly fading into the throng of leaves underneath her. Marie uses a thin glazing technique to create the translucent effect.

“I’m glazing the lights and the darks but sort of leaving a little bit of the background as my mid tone for the figures,” she explains. “I use the nature background to convey this world and paint the figures transparent to convey us as spiritual beings. This juxtaposition allows me to create this bridge between the physical and the spiritual worlds… I really wanted to sort of push that feeling of the spirituality within the work and keep it monochromatic. I feel that green is really resonant with the heart chakra, and sort of allows room for growth and healing.”

To our surprise, the artist admits that she does sometimes grow bored of just painting in green and has recently begun adding elements like clouds and pops of color. In one of her pieces, “Three Kingdoms,” three faceless figures stand next to each other reflecting in their form the darkness of an unending void, the plant kingdom, and the realm of the sky. She’s also experimenting with sculpture, which she hopes to show publicly soon.

“I think the most important thing that I want my audience to take away from my work is to have a self-reflective moment and think about your own thoughts on spirituality,” she says. “What is in the great beyond? Is there a great beyond? Is there something bigger than us? Do you connect with that? How do you connect with that? How does that change the way that you see the world? How does that change the way you connect with the world?”

To keep up with Ashley Marie, you can follow her on Instagram at @ashleymarieart.