Artist Statement

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My paintings draw from personal memories and recollections of place, exploring how the past shifts, fragments, and resurfaces over time. Through drawing and collage, I gather and rearrange these fragments into layered compositions of richly saturated color, shapes, and textures. Forms overlap, repeat, and shift in scale, creating spaces where memories blur, moments fold into one another, and the familiar becomes strange.

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Each painting develops its own visual language through an intuitive process of experimentation and revision. Color, pattern, and spatial relationships evoke places that feel both recognizable and elusive, suspended between recollection and imagination. Through layering and transformation, I explore the shifting nature of memory and the ways our perceptions of place and time continue to change long after an experience has passed.

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Artist Biography​​

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Elissa Buchalter is a Seattle-based artist. She holds an MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art and a BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art. She was awarded a Fulbright Research Grant to India, where she studied traditional Buddhist Thangka painting as a contemplative practice. She has also completed residencies at Burren College of Art in Ireland and the New York Studio Residency Program in DUMBO, New York.