Elise Schweitzer crafts a labyrinth of rich color and liminal spaces through her Painted Arches and Walled Gardens. This current body of work was created during her recent sabbatical, Fall 2019 through Spring 2020. In January 2020 she co-taught a class of Hollins University students in Florence, Italy, with Genevieve Hendricks, an art and architectural historian. Schweitzer stayed on in Florence after the class, then spent time in Rome, including two weeks as a Visiting Artist at the American Academy. Class time in Florence was spent lecturing on and drawing Renaissance art, architecture, and sculpture. The class spent hours studying and drawing on location with compasses and triangles. After her teaching stint ended, Schweitzer continued to ruminate on the art and the concepts her class had seen and discussed.

 

Schweitzer is well known for her large-scale figurative action-filled oil paintings. These small, beautiful, jewel-like gouache paintings are conceptual departures. One could describe them as cerebral exercises filled with experimentation, sometimes humor, and focused on the play of light, shapes, and color. Schweitzer comments about this shift in style: “when I am composing a figurative painting I was always thinking about the direction of the light, the relationship of colors, the balance of opaque to translucent areas in the painting... I think part of making this work was cutting through the need to have a realistic reference and instead just painting the thing that I had  always been excited about, without the motif.”

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from the catalogue essay "Arches, Albers, Artichokes, and Hexagons" by Jenine Culligan

View the full catalogue here.