Above Atlantic Avenue, the LIRR barrels through Bedford-Stuyvesant. Below its elevated tracks, Jonna Twigg ignores the noise and paints on. When the 23-year-old artist hears the train approaching she turns up her stereo and continues to lace a canvas with agile brushstrokes of black India ink. “I used to paint with oils but I couldn’t wait for them to dry,” she said, sighing. “I work fast, and I’m not the type of person to sit and mull over something for a long time.”

The Columbus, Ohio, native began painting on a lark five years ago. “I’d already been accepted to a bunch of colleges, so I figured I’d take my senior year off,” she recalled. “I did an independent study on drawing and that became the only class I cared about.”

College temporarily fell by the wayside, but after a semester off and a little pressure from her family, she enrolled in the Columbus College of Art and Design in January 2000. Her bachelor’s-degree studies included everything from Western European art – which she disliked – to cartoon animation. African art, she said, was “the hardest class she’s ever taken.” When she graduated in December 2003, she beat a heated retreat to New York City in search of inspiration.

She spent her first three months in New York working nonstop to meet the deadline for her first professional exhibit back in Ohio. Last April the ROY G BIV Gallery in Columbus displayed 54 of her paintings. Six were purchased, and the local arts magazine, Columbus Alive, lauded her work as hypnotic, exciting, and mysterious.

Since then, Ms. Twigg has maintained a humble existence on the fringes of the New York art scene. She works for a prominent Chelsea framer on the weekends in order to have her weekdays free to translate her abstract visions into tangible artwork. The imagery she creates, though conceptual, often contains familiar forms. For instance, viewers undoubtedly note the multiheaded figures with birds in the place of eyes. “The birds became a symbol of my own migration,” she explained. “I’d moved to a new place and I was progressing into a new style of painting.”

In the past three years, Ms. Twigg has finished 160 canvases, 50 of which she’s abandoned or painted over. “I don’t like when people say artists shouldn’t throw stuff away,” she insisted. “That’s baloney. If you feel like it’s unnecessary you should get rid of it.” Her willingness to change came from studying fellow painters Takashi Murakami, Yoshimoto Nara, and Inka Essenhigh. She met Ms. Essenhigh for coffee and speaks highly of her work. “Inka’s figures are so fluid that they made me realize everything in my work was standing still,” she says. “I was laboring over my paintings so all the lines ended up the same width. Now I never go over a line twice.”

Ms. Twigg’s brushwork has become more immediate as her personal style has evolved, sometimes dripping over earlier lines on the same surface. The interplay between the backing landscapes and the figures in the foreground demonstrates a more profound understanding of depth and angles. “I appreciate the way she creates abstractions that are filled with narrative,” said Brett Cook-Dizney, a public installation artist who was recently an artist-in-residence at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. “They suggest figuration but the stories she tells aren’t didactic. They’re genuine reflections on what it is to make feelings and emotions into form.”

Her more recent works exude honesty, most often juxtaposing the vulnerability and enthusiasm of a newcomer in the big city. “My feeling of loneliness here absolutely manifests itself in my paintings,” she admitted. “That’s been the most difficult thing about relocating to New York. If you don’t know anyone here it’s a lot to bear. But I also see that as a challenge and I try to paint the excitement of coming to a new place and getting the opportunity to reinvent myself.”

Now that she’s more familiar with the city she anticipates a shift away from her initial melancholy. “Thematically my work is about embracing change,” she said. “It’s escapism. As my experiences here change, so does my work. I made some depressing paintings for a while,” she continued and then paused to laugh. “I would show them to people and they’d say, whoa, Jonna, you’re stressed!”

These days life isn’t so distressing. In November she erected a mural in Open Air, a trendy lounge on Saint Mark’s Place. Currently she’s preparing new canvases for her first New York exhibit – a three-person show sponsored by the Yili Art Foundation that also features Nicanor Cruz, the art director of Tablist magazine and illustrator Caleb Santana. The show isn’t until April so she has plenty of time to prepare. Almost too much time if you ask her. “I’m impatient with myself,” she says again. “But I think I told you that already.”