Peaches, Cherries, and Peonies, Oil on linen, 16" x 16"
Elizabeth Johnson: Your exhibit’s title, In Visibility, seems to beckon the viewer to enter and inhabit your compositions: the luxurious color and paint handling are irresistible.
What does the title express for you?
Christine Lafuente: The title is a play on words derived from what I’ve been exploring since I began painting atmospheres in Maine. The presence of fog and mist lower the visibility in a different way than blinding light or shadow. I am composing with what I see despite its transient nature.
At times, all I can glean from a visual experience are notes of light and color in space, of visual poetic moments.
EJ: Three new cityscapes Fog and Snow, Brooklyn Steeples, Last Light toward Manhattan, and Sunset Sky toward New York Harbor capture, respectively, flat light of a snowy overcast day, ruddy evening light on buildings, and pastel hues of sunset.
Do you think of the sky as a reflective surface perhaps like the shiny enamel table upon which you compose still lifes?
Winter Afternoon in Brooklyn, Oil on mounted canvas, 9" x 12"
CL: I love that suggestion.
It opens another way to think about how visual phenomena repeats and evolves over forms, like a hall of mirrors.
I often think of the enamel tabletop as a metaphor for a watery surface reflecting the world and the sky, but it is true that the moisture in the air makes the sky another surface that abstracts and echoes what is happening in the light.
Blue Vase, Peonies, and Red Cup, Oil on linen, 9" x 12"
EJ: In our 2023 interview you said, "Setting up a still life is like playing with dolls, where I am creating a tableau that can read both as an abstract design and as a figurative narrative. Composing a still life takes a long time but once I feel settled enough to accept every corner of the tableau, I tend not to rearrange, but just play the notes I’ve given myself." Does "playing the notes you give yourself" in still life correspond to playing the notes that nature gives you in landscape? Do you improvise composition more in one or the other?
CL: For me, the greatest difference between painting still life in the studio with a constant single light source and painting en plein air can best be described as the difference between playing a piece of music that is relatively fixed and playing a piece of music that is constantly being rewritten. The sun moves, humidity changes, tides ebb and flow, color harmonies continually shift.
Peonies, Cherries, and Bottles, Oil on linen, 18" x 22"
CL: The painting Last Light Toward Manhattan is an example of trying to paint the rapidly changing light of the end of the day. Painting at that time of day requires an abbreviation of abstract moments, which may read as more improvisational. The subject may be color harmonies that evolve as the light changes rather than architecture or topography.
EJ: Buildings in a landscape and bottles and objects on a table make visual rhythm that you delve into and explore as riotous, prismatic color combinations. What influences you to make an airy setup such as the one that inspired Peonies, Cherries and Bottles as opposed to the denser one that must have inspired painting Dahlias in the Sun, which treats objects and space between objects more abstractly?
CL: Dahlias in the Sun is a different kind of still life because it is painted en plein air with moving sunlight. It is more compatible in treatment to a landscape painting done at sunset. The temperature of the light at that time is very warm, and the light’s movement is hard to grasp all at once...
Dahlias in the Sun, Oil on linen, 16" x 12"
CL: ...Painting flowers in the moving sun is one of the most seductively pleasurable and impossible tasks. It is so beautiful and so mercurial and so very brief. The dahlia blossom on the table wilted like a fallen ice cream cone as I was working.
Christine Lafuente studio painting in Venice, Italy
CL: Peonies, Cherries, and Bottles is inspired by a combination of glass skyscrapers across the Brooklyn and Manhattan Skyline and reflections of palazzos on the canals in Venice while riding the vaporetto.
The shelves are opportunities for vignettes that one might see through windows or archways, small worlds that are reflected on the tabletop below like a call and response.
My studio set up, employing natural light from north-facing windows, the tabletop, and a generous amount of space lets me create a scenic backdrop that conjures places that live in my mind’s eye.
Meadow by the Sea, Oil on linen, 10" x 10"
EJ: Meadow by the Sea is both evocative of nature and very reductive. It doesn't feel "real" to me in the way that your other pieces do but, rather, like the idea of a place.
How did this piece happen? What do you think of it?
CL: This painting is part of a series of a view I’ve painted again and again. Because of its small canvas size, I aim to reduce it to poetic elements.
It expresses a shift in color harmony from the darker saturated foreground to the tinted far distance. In that way, it does begin to be an idea of a place. It came together in a way that I could not repeat after that––though I tried. This just goes to show that as soon as I think I’ve discovered an “ideal” of beauty, nature rebels.
EJ: Mist in the Harbor also feels positively challenged by empty space: there are no reflecting and interacting verticals as in your still lifes, rather horizontal layered color.
Is dissolving vertical objects the opposite of assembling muted horizontally banded landscapes? Do both "play the notes I've given myself"?
Mist in the Harbor, Oil on mounted canvas, 10" x 10"
CL: How can the feeling of a glowing bath of light be expressed in brushstrokes of oil color? In Mist in the Harbor, the light through the mist in that moment was like an envelope of pink.
The empty space is an envelope of atmosphere through which forms suggest themselves but never quite resolve. These en plein air paintings are about the air between the painter and the landscape, about the color of atmosphere, about a presence which is a visual, emotional, and poetic experience of space.
There is something fun about playing with stripes in a painting. It makes us more aware that an image is made of marks, and depending how the eye focuses, forms can recede or assert themselves.
With the side-lit composition of many of these still lifes, the facets of light and shadow can march across the table vertically. With a back-lit set up, like many of my seascapes, it is the atmospheric perspective and horizon that break up tones.
I may sometimes push these “stripey” conventions to the edge of absurdity and then see if I can counter them by looking perpendicularly, across forms, yielding an implication of a grid or weave.
Acadian Daybreak, Oil on linen, 24" x 30"
Pink and White Peonies with Bottles In Between, Oil on linen, 14" x 24"
EJ: Pink and White Peonies with Bottles In Between is divided into two parts, more abstract on the right and more realistic on the left. Is this related to the light coming in from the left? Tulips, Bottles and Sugar Bowl dissolves toward the bottom into the table. Was there a point in "playing the notes" for these two pieces that you let the notes unravel? Did you make a drawing before you painted these pieces?
CL: Pink and White Peonies with Bottles In Between can be read from left to right in the way that the English language is often read from left to right. There is also, in the center of the painting, the bottles. It combines two overlapping compositions. The “Bottles In Between” could go with either side. In a sense, this painting is cinematic or like a mural, made of overlapping stills. This implies the movement of time and a shift of attention from one place to the next. That one side feels realistic and the other a bit wild and abstract is also what happens when I write longhand!
Tulips, Bottles, and Sugar Bowl, Oil on linen, 20" x 24"
CL: In November of 2023 I did an artist residency in Venice, Italy, at the Scuola Internazionale di Grafica. I was enchanted with reflections of architecture in the canals, which are reflected in the windows of buildings.
A reflection is an abstraction of what seems solid but is also just a phenomenon of light. Reflections give us another way to see the world that allows for the viewer’s imagination to complete a picture. In 2025 I began painting the New York skyline from my new residence and eventually began composing arrangements of bottles that approximated the feeling of sun coming across the buildings. I played with the idea of floating the city on a sea of glass. Tulips, Bottles and Sugar Bowl is a metaphor for this idea.
I can’t remember if I made drawings for these two paintings, but sometimes I’ll do a pencil drawing to tune in to the composition. And sometimes I’ll begin with a tonal imprimatura before painting in full color. These preparatory drawings are helpful but rarely dictate what happens later with color.
Roses, Bottles, and Brass Bowl, Oil on linen, 16" x 24"
EJ: What inspired the texture in Roses, Bottles and Brass Bowl? Is this a "ragged" effect?
Do you find you work differently on larger pieces? Do you sometimes make charcoal drawings before you paint on large surfaces?
CL: The texture is from using an Egbert hog bristle brush in different directions. Often, when I begin a series of still life paintings, the canvases are small.
As I continue, the canvases get larger and the composition more complex. What you may be picking up on is not charcoal drawing but the use of vine black oil color as a wash.
Vine black is made of the same substance as charcoal (burnt wood), but I am using it in oil color form.
Christine Lafuente's Studio
EJ: You mention in your notes that "During the winter months, I paint large canvases and use oil sketches for source. These are experimental in paint handling and imaginary in feeling. Painting large canvases from paintings and memory is another aspect of my process." Is Roses, Bottles and Brass Bowl in this category? Does a different kind of mystery develop from scaling up?
CL: Roses, Bottles and Brass Bowl was part of a series from this past fall, which led to Acadian Daybreak and Across the Shore. Both that series of still life paintings and the ensuing large canvases were influenced by summer paintings in Maine. Working large from observation is a very different problem than scaling up a small painting. My large canvases often refer to small en plein air sketches but don’t end up as scaled up version of small paintings. Paint handling takes over the image.
The mystery of making large paintings from sketches is that it is an opportunity to see through my mind’s eye and the experience of visual memory instead of having a visual phenomenon in front of me...
CL: ...That visual memory can persist like an after-image––this is the mystery. In a large canvas, I am mining that collection of visual experiences I gather from painting a place many times. That after-image also often persists when I return to a place to paint from nature. I go back looking for what I remember.
Trawler in the Bay, Oil on linen, 12" x 12"
Painter's Cabinet, Oil on mounted linen, 12" x 12"
EJ: I often think of a painter as someone happily driving in the slow lane. In a time of digital image overload, how does your approach to painting invite the viewer to join you in the slow lane?
CL: The painter says, “I paint what I see,” and it seems as simple as a musician playing the notes in a musical score, or an actor reading lines from a script. But the painter is also building the instrument, and every time the painter looks up, the entire piece has changed key. The melody itself is constantly transposing.
Human sight is elastic, priority of attention is subjective, eye health creates distortion, and we are “understanding” or “recognizing” a thing with as much that is invisible as what's visible.
We have been so camera-conditioned that we think photographs are realistic. But a digital image is far from the reality of a painter’s extended visual experience.
A painter is not a point-and-shooter: the painter must visually grasp and make decisions about all the places in the rectangle, including the places that are secondary negative space.
Pansies and Candlestick by the Window, Oil on linen, 11" x 14"
CL: The painter must look at the chaotic, muddy foreground below a transcendent sky, must look at the shadowy wall behind a lit bouquet of flowers.
As soon as the focus shifts, it is tempting to make the painting all about the muddy ground or all about the dirty wall. Painting from nature is an opportunity to see poetically in a way that a camera cannot.
Painting takes time. And in that space of time nothing is still.
When I decide on a composition, it is usually in the middle of the process rather than the beginning. In a way, the later the better and before the brush touches the canvas.
I spend time looking, mixing, I might do a drawing, I’m adjusting tones, I’m gathering materials, but mostly I am being with the thing I see for a long exposure and allowing it to reveal a composition.
Spires in December, Oil on mounted canvas, 12" x 12"
Christine Lafuente's Studio
About the Artist
Christine Lafuente: In Visibility | May 1 - 30, 2026
Christine Lafuente is a graduate of Bryn Mawr College and received her Certificate in painting and printmaking from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. After spending years in Philadelphia where she was artist-in-residence at the Fleisher Art Memorial, Lafuente moved to Brooklyn and completed her MFA at Brooklyn College in 2004. In 2023, Christine received a grant from the Schaevitz Foundation and attended a printmaking residency at Scuola Internazionale di Grafica in Venice, Italy. Lafuente has been represented by Gross McCleaf Gallery since 2002.