Women of Abstraction Series
A continuing exploration of women who reshaped abstract painting across geography, history, and artistic language.
Women of Abstraction Series
The Women of Abstraction Series is an invitation into a rich and fascinating world where painting, art history, personal expression, and creative discovery meet.
This is not only a series about artists. It is a series about ideas, courage, innovation, and the many ways women helped shape modern art across New York, California, Europe, and beyond.
Along the way, you will encounter striking personalities, bold techniques, unexpected stories, changing styles, and the cultural moments that gave rise to them. We will explore gesture, color, composition, intuition, structure, freedom, and the many visual languages of abstraction.
There will be conversations about museums, important exhibitions, overlooked legacies, and the ways art history is still being rewritten today.
Whether you are new to painting, returning after many years, or already experienced, this series offers something meaningful at every level.
You may come for inspiration, for knowledge, for the pleasure of looking, or for the desire to create more freely.
Most likely, you will leave with a wider horizon, a deeper eye, and a renewed sense of what painting can be.
It is an all-round, deeply engaging series unlike anything conventional art classes usually offer, thoughtful, stimulating, welcoming, and alive with possibility.
Close-up of a large oil painting ~ Elisabeth Vismans
Women of Abstraction Series
Six pathways into abstract painting through the women who shaped it.
New York Fire
Gesture • Emotion • Postwar intensity
The energy of postwar New York, where painting became physical, psychological, and bold.
Artists may include:
Joan Mitchell, Pat Passlof, Lee Krasner, Grace Hartigan, Elaine de Kooning
California Light
Gesture • Emotion • Postwar intensity
The energy of postwar New York, where painting became physical, psychological, and bold.
Artists may include:
Joan Mitchell, Pat Passlof, Lee Krasner, Grace Hartigan, Elaine de Kooning
European Voices
Space • Experimentation • Freedom
West Coast abstraction shaped by openness, light, and material exploration.
Artists may include:
Jay DeFeo, Joan Brown, Sonia Gechtoff, Deborah Remington, Mary Heilmann
Hidden Figures
Rediscovery • Legacy • Correction
Artists whose work mattered deeply but was left outside the main narrative.
Artists may include:
Pat Passlof, Perle Fine, Judith Godwin, Charlotte Park, others
Living Women Abstractionists
Now • Continuity • New Directions
Contemporary artists continuing and reinventing abstraction today.
Ways of Abstraction
Gesture • Color • Structure • Symbol • Intuition
A theme-based series exploring the many visual languages of abstraction.
Possible sessions: Gesture & Movement, Color & Atmosphere, Geometry & Structure, Symbol & Mystery, Intuitive Process Painting, Surface & Texture.
Gestural painting on canvas 30×40″ ~ Elisabeth Vismans
Why do so many people come to abstraction later in life?
Perhaps because something shifts.
The need to please begins to fade.
The old rules lose their grip.
Perfection becomes less interesting than truth.
Many people arrive at this work after years of doing what was expected of them — raising families, building careers, being responsible, being practical, being everything to everyone.
And then, quietly, a question appears:
What about me?
Abstract painting can be a surprising answer.
Not because it is easy.
Not because there are no challenges.
But because it offers space.
Space to explore.
Space to feel.
Space to make marks that do not need permission.
Space to discover what is still alive inside you.
You do not need to know your style.
You do not need to be “good at art.”
You do not need to have started earlier.
Sometimes a personal voice becomes clearer precisely when life has taught you who you are.
If this speaks to you, I invite you to → Explore the Series.