Lisa Bartleson, now working in the San Francisco Bay Area, continues the legacy of Southern California painting’s rich abstract history utilizing a personal technique and process that further elucidate the key elements of the Light and Space aesthetic. The Sphere body of works consists of repetitive, meditative mark making and luminous color strips. Bartleson paints in a methodical fashion starting from a saturated dark color and slowly adding in measured amounts of a lighter color. She then uses a pearlized color to deepen and strengthen the luminescence. After painting, she cuts the paper in one-inch squares and layers them in the same order as they were painted. Bartleson uses a reductive vocabulary of form and color to make work that is infused with light. The nuanced surfaces of her paintings are at once intense and calming, moving and still. This results in works with a field of discrete transitions between hues of color. In each of these works, the focus is on a horizon or center point of luminescence to draw the viewer in, in hopes of evoking a meditative state of seeing things differently and more clearly.
In early 2016 Lisa Bartleson moved from Los Angeles to Petaluma, drawn to the city’s diffused light, vast open space, and small town feel, reminiscent of the Pacific Northwest where she was born and raised. In February 2017 the artist will be exhibiting her body of work The Memory Project at the Museum of Art and History in Lancaster, California. Her work is currently in the exhibition Work Over School: Art From The Margins of the Inside at the Craft and Folk Art Museum in Los Angeles. This exhibition focuses on artists who have developed great conceptual and technical skill through nontraditional means.