Lisa Blas is a CHamoru / Italian-American painter and educator working between New York and Brussels. Utilizing references in art history and the environment, she produces “afterchromes”—abstract paintings that speak to the porous chroma and increasing fragility of the natural world. Recent publications of her work have appeared in Effects Journal, University of Hawai’i Press, The Brooklyn Rail and The Drift. Blas publishes the weekly "Monday’s image", digital pairings of newspaper front pages with artworks from museum collections. In 2024, she was artist-in-residence at Frans Masereel Centrum, Belgium. Blas exhibits nationally and internationally, and currently teaches at New York Academy of Art. In April 2025, she will be artist-in-residence at Uillinn: West Cork Arts Centre, Skibbereen, Ireland.
Statement
Lisa Blas | Afterchromes | Artist Statement 2024
Since March 2020, I have concentrated my artistic interest in the concept of the oculus, a portal of light connecting interior space to the outer environment. While visiting architectural sites in Rome in 2018, I became fascinated with the dome of Francesco Borromini’s church, San Carlino, where daylight filters through an oval in the center of the ceiling. This shape reemerged during the pandemic lockdown, when I developed Dawn Studio, an ongoing daily painting practice that I commence at sunrise everyday. Between 5:00 and 6:00 a.m., I begin by looking out my living room window, interior to exterior, over the western horizon and Hudson River — a meeting of sky and water that dramatically shifts in tonality throughout weather patterns and seasons. The process of painting these repetitive views has shifted my understanding of light from a linear distribution to overlapping, circular movements of color, mirroring the shape of the eye, producing an oculus. Through these daily sensations of vision, the landscape appears to bend and one becomes acutely aware of the curvature of the earth. The paintings are made with translucent and opaque watercolor, inks, and pigment on small to medium sized paper, canvas and panel. Back in the studio, I work on large-scale paintings on canvas that have expanded out to site-specific installations at 4 x 2 meters (Skibbereen, Ireland and Brussels, Belgium).
In painting, I use modes of abstraction as an artistic route to contemplate notions of invisibility and missing histories. The ocular shapes and curvilinear marks within my paintings resemble contingent spaces — islands and absences — echoing a desire for homeland amid long distances, and the possibility for contact.