Asher on Halloween Painting

I was born in New York City in 1969, but was raised in Northern California. Art and music has always been very important to me and my family. My grandmother was a NYC gallery owner and she passed on a great love of art to me. My father and step father are both in the music business, so I was always surrounded by amazing music and musicians. I have incorporated my love of music and love of friends, family and people in general into my paintings. I recently left a career in design and have spent the last year and a half getting back to my love, painting.

I paint on larger canvases, enlarging my subjects getting in very close and blowing up details. I feel this way that the work has more impact, that it commands a more intimate connection with the viewer. It has taken me years to go back to making work in the same manner in which I first started working, in the way that made me love being an artist to begin with. I learned to paint with oil paint in high school and was hooked. Painting is the best way for me to connect to and honor people.

My decision making is mainly intuitive. I choose photographs that draw me in, these images are generally personal. I stick with the theme of people because they have always been my favorite subjects. Many of the people that I paint are people that I deeply care for, miss, or mourn. When I paint someone, I feel connected to them, as if we are sharing something. Sometimes my subject matter is just poetic, moving or beautiful images that I am inspired to portray in paint. The greatest challenge within my work is to capture the essence of my subject. I hope the viewer will gain greater insight into the subjects I paint, to have their own emotional connections and impressions of the work.

I feel blessed to have led an interesting life and want to express that in my work. Everything from spending time in a drug house in San Francisco, eating dinner with Italian royalty in New York, to working in a shoe factory in China. My upbringing in the San Francisco Bay Area in the 1970s and 80s was also a unique experience that plays a huge role in my art now. As the daughter and granddaughter of music and art business people, I was exposed to amazing people and situations that really formed me as an adult. It is my desire that some of these life experiences are conveyed in the work.