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Stephanie began her artistic journey as a realistic painter. Graduate study led her into landscape abstraction and then to non-objective abstraction. Stephanie Visser uses color, light and emotion to articulate abstract compositions on canvas. Her mature working methodology is inspired by instruction received at the graduate level layered upon a classical arts education. The ideas for the canvases are distilled from techniques that she learned from Mary Winterfield, whom she counts as one of the primary influences to her current painting style. Winterfield, an instructor at the Pasadena College of Art and Design, studied at the the Arts Student League of New York and the Cape School under Henry Hensche. Winterfield taught Visser the spatial push pull theories of Hans Hoffman as well the use of color keys to depict the color of light itself. Visser employs what she terms abstract simplification to create strong soaring work.
“Every one of my daily experiences leave an echo within me that resonates. The ideas, people, places and things that reveal themselves in my work are inspired by physical experience, my emotions, intuitions, or spiritual insight as a result of what is often a fleeting moment. Meaning is buried in the same way as that name or word you struggle for on the tip of your tongue or memories and impressions of people, places and events we all try to recall once they are past. Images may be reminiscent of the shore, a city street, a wooded hillside, a neighborhood, a
person, or a highway. I explore those things through tone, pattern, light, space, color and texture non-objectively. Deeply intimate and suggestive, the paintings can create sensations that comfort, or pinch, stirring up emotion and memory. Mind photographs that reflect and evoke everyday life as sunlight and shadow, stillness and movement or sound and quiet. I am a perpetual voyeur. Standing back, observing places, people and events and imagining in some way what goes on behind and below the surface, the color of life lived, sometimes in quiet desperation, sometimes inexplicably ordinary but more often mysteriously beautiful no matter how humble.
Done most often in series, the pieces themselves are made up of acrylic, oil, graphite, and collage along with other media on a multitude of surfaces and in multiples of combinations. My process begins by activating the canvas with texture and then laying down gestures and marks which leads to color, shape, and form. Adding and obliterating until the body gives me the signal to stop. Much like a Rorschach inkblot but infinitely more subtle. Images are built layer upon layer through translucent color washes, scumbled paint, markings and sometimes bits and pieces of cast off materials which are used to enrich the surface, revealing a lyrical, magical and often mysterious world lit from the inside-out.”
Stephanie Visser
West Hollywood, CA
"Organic Abstraction"
A native of southwestern Michigan, Stephanie Visser relocated to sunny southern California in 2003. Educated at Kendall College of Art and Design in Grand Rapids Michigan, she graduated there with her BFA in Fine Arts. She continued her education in fine arts and painting at Western Michigan University and Pasadena College of Art and Design.Stephanie began her artistic journey as a realistic painter. Graduate study led her into landscape abstraction and then to non-objective abstraction. Stephanie Visser uses color, light and emotion to articulate abstract compositions on canvas. Her mature working methodology is inspired by instruction received at the graduate level layered upon a classical arts education. The ideas for the canvases are distilled from techniques that she learned from Mary Winterfield, whom she counts as one of the primary influences to her current painting style. Winterfield, an instructor at the Pasadena College of Art and Design, studied at the the Arts Student League of New York and the Cape School under Henry Hensche. Winterfield taught Visser the spatial push pull theories of Hans Hoffman as well the use of color keys to depict the color of light itself. Visser employs what she terms abstract simplification to create strong soaring work.
“Every one of my daily experiences leave an echo within me that resonates. The ideas, people, places and things that reveal themselves in my work are inspired by physical experience, my emotions, intuitions, or spiritual insight as a result of what is often a fleeting moment. Meaning is buried in the same way as that name or word you struggle for on the tip of your tongue or memories and impressions of people, places and events we all try to recall once they are past. Images may be reminiscent of the shore, a city street, a wooded hillside, a neighborhood, a
person, or a highway. I explore those things through tone, pattern, light, space, color and texture non-objectively. Deeply intimate and suggestive, the paintings can create sensations that comfort, or pinch, stirring up emotion and memory. Mind photographs that reflect and evoke everyday life as sunlight and shadow, stillness and movement or sound and quiet. I am a perpetual voyeur. Standing back, observing places, people and events and imagining in some way what goes on behind and below the surface, the color of life lived, sometimes in quiet desperation, sometimes inexplicably ordinary but more often mysteriously beautiful no matter how humble.
Done most often in series, the pieces themselves are made up of acrylic, oil, graphite, and collage along with other media on a multitude of surfaces and in multiples of combinations. My process begins by activating the canvas with texture and then laying down gestures and marks which leads to color, shape, and form. Adding and obliterating until the body gives me the signal to stop. Much like a Rorschach inkblot but infinitely more subtle. Images are built layer upon layer through translucent color washes, scumbled paint, markings and sometimes bits and pieces of cast off materials which are used to enrich the surface, revealing a lyrical, magical and often mysterious world lit from the inside-out.”
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Wescover creator since 2022
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