Peace from Anxiety with Jade Carter
May is recognized as Mental Health Awareness Month, a time dedicated to increasing awareness around emotional wellness and encouraging honest conversations about mental health, stress, anxiety, and healing.
This month, the Petersburg Public Library is proud to feature Virginia-based contemporary abstract artist Jade Carter (Doing Business as Creating AS) and her exhibit, Peace from Anxiety.
The title alone speaks to something many people quietly experience every day.
Anxiety can often feel overwhelming, loud, unpredictable, and difficult to explain. For some, it appears as racing thoughts or emotional exhaustion. For others, it can feel like pressure to keep pushing forward while carrying invisible weight. In a world filled with constant noise, responsibilities, and uncertainty, finding moments of peace has become increasingly important.
Through texture, movement, and layered emotion, Creating AS transforms those feelings into visual expression.
Inspired by music, film, perseverance, vulnerability, and everyday life, her abstract works explore the tension between chaos and calm. Some paintings emerge intense and emotionally charged, while others offer softness, stillness, and reflection. Together, the collection creates a visual conversation about resilience, identity, emotional honesty, and the search for peace within difficult moments.
Working with acrylic paint, acrylic ink, spray paint, spackle, paint knives, and Sakura ink pens, Creating AS embraces experimentation and instinct as essential parts of the creative process. Rather than aiming for perfection, she allows emotion to guide each piece organically.
Influenced by Vincent van Gogh and Michelangelo, Creating AS views art as both expression and escape — a way to process emotion, block out the noise of the world, and create something honest from it.
Featured works in the exhibit include:
- Pieces, a connected three-piece composition exploring individuality within unity
- Backbone, a textured work symbolizing strength and resilience
- Victorian, a matte black textured painting embracing emotional honesty and self-expression
- The Best of Me, a piece created through emotional exhaustion and perseverance, inspired in part by Suga and themes of resilience
During Mental Health Awareness Month, Peace from Anxiety serves as a reminder that creativity can be more than art. It can become reflection, release, healing, and connection.
Sometimes peace does not arrive all at once. Sometimes it is found in quiet moments, honest expression, supportive spaces, music, books, conversation, or even standing in front of a painting that reflects something you have felt but never knew how to describe.
We invite the community to visit the exhibit, reflect, and take a moment for themselves inside the library’s gallery space.
Come. Discover the Wonder Within You.
