Michelle Blade (1981- )

Michelle Blade (b. 1981 Los Angeles, CA) makes autobiographical paintings and drawings that reflect her deep communion with the natural world. Inspired largely by her immediate surroundings in Southern California, Blade’s large-scale paintings depict lush wild gardens, bursting sunsets over desert landscapes, and scenes of her daughters as they traverse Los Angeles, a city in which her family has lived for four generations. Reflecting on care and stewardship, her work documents the stillness, beauty and persistence of the environment around her while simultaneously capturing the seasons of her parenthood.

Working primarily with a wet-on-wet technique, Blade applies thin, transparent layers of acrylic and ink on stretched poplin, encouraging the paint to bleed and bloom into ethereal landscapes filled with soft, abstracted details. Describing the process, Blade likens the mediums’ unpredictability akin to working with an invisible collaborator. In recording her personal and spiritual connection to the place, Blade’s work expresses an ineffable emotional truth embedded in the landscape.

Blade has exhibited throughout the world, including Los Angeles, San Francisco, Santa Fe, Stockholm, London, Maastricht, Tel Aviv, Hong Kong, Taipei, and Beijing. Her recent solo exhibitions include Grace Electric (Asia Art Center, Beijing, 2024), Between the Bones and Now (Micki Meng, San Francisco, CA, 2023), Maker of Meaning (Asia Art Center, Taipei, 2023), and group exhibition The Journey Before Me (Marin Museum of Contemporary Art, San Francisco, CA, 2024). Blade’s work has been featured in The New York Times Magazine, The Los Angeles Times, The Paris Review, Juxtapoz, The California Sunday Magazine, and Art Maze. Michelle Blade holds a BA from Loyola Marymount, Los Angeles (2003) and an MFA from the California College of the Arts, San Francisco (2008).