Elizabeth Johnson: In “The Strangely Familiar Art of Celia Reisman,” from the blog Tidings of Magpies, you say, "My aim is not to replicate the visual experience, but to communicate the feeling of visual excitement when I first see something of interest." As an artist rooted in suburban imagery, are you at first generally captivated more by light and color than architectural structure or detail? And does painting in Vermont in summer have a particular effect

Celia Reisman: People think I will paint any domestic setting, but there has to be some quirky something that catches my eye. I see some place, stop to look, then decide if I can compose a picture. It's not one type of subject matter in the domestic landscape that excites me. It could be a color, a pink house, intense fall colors, or the sunlight that day creating dramatic abstract shadows on buildings. Architecture that is painted in color––purples, greens, oranges––attract my attention. A single tree, an umbrella, a playset: anything can provide inspiration. It’s unpredictable. I go to small Vermont towns with close-set buildings surrounded by open landscape, and sometimes there is a distant view. I rarely paint the distant views, though landscape painting often uses deep space. My work has shallow space made from shapes piled on top of each other: I'm more interested in confrontation and congestion within the rectangle.

EJ: In the same article you speak of chance: "I work from drawings, but as much as I may plan the painting, it always presents unexpected surprises. Sometimes they are clearly exciting and sometimes they create more problems for me." Looking at your recent work from 2025–26, I sense a reduced palette sometimes replacing your usual full range of warm-to-cool colors. Do you choose between the two approaches when you start? Or do you allow your approach to find you?

CR: I aim to control the color, but each painting has a life of its own.

Elements may interfere with completing a painting: a shape is too large or placed wrong; an edge is too strong; there's spatial confusion, etc.

A painting is finished when I feel that that all the elements fit together and I can live with the relationships. Sometimes I put one aside, and when I look at it again, it is obvious what changes need to be made. Some get finished quickly, others wait to be completed. I always have more than one painting going in the studio.

EJ: I love the carefully modulated skies of Color Starts, Approaching Rain, Camellia, Cherry Time, Warm Winter.

Did you combine working from drawings, photos, memory, and imagination to invent these believable skies? Do you establish the sky mood first? And does your rendering of sky often change?

CR: Thanks for noticing the skies––I establish a sky color in the beginning. Color Starts and Approaching Rain are twenty-four-inch squares based on gouache drawings made on-site. The sky takes up almost half of the canvas, modulates from dark to light and reinforces the color field.

Cherry Time is from a series of small tree paintings. The cloud shapes and cherry tree are highlighted together.

CR: Previously, large geometric shapes filled up the canvas with little room for background spaces. With current work, larger areas of sky and foreground allow me to add new elements. I like to identify and name areas, so the top of painting becomes a river or includes a mountain. I can’t seem to allow an area to exist on its own as one would in an abstraction. I’m curious that you mention “the stability of the buildings.” Do they feel less anchored by competing with the backgrounds? 

EJ: Not less anchored, but more exciting near your new backgrounds. My personal distrust of straight lines affects how I read buildings, so, I welcome your new attention to skies and open spaces.

I notice the way grouping yards and gardens: Abundance of Fall, Main Street Blue, Main Street Green unify trees with harmonious color and shapes into a background frieze; and Tall Fall, Strafford Hedges, Cherry Time, and Camellia activate foreground space through contrast of color and individual bushes and trees.

Expressive individual plants have always been central to your paintings. In terms of vehicles for color, do you treat trees differently than buildings, which are subject to editing and reimagining?

CR: Unifying trees as a “background frieze” is a great way to describe the use of nature in the work. Painting a mass of trees is another new approach. Buildings are easier to invent and redesign. I usually paint nature as some sort of green, with changes of scale and shape. I'm literal in many ways, and though nature sometimes provides red or purple bushes, I stick to local color with adjustments.

EJ: At first glance, Purple Umbrella reads unfinished. Then the harmonized salmon tones kick in to express surprising depth. How did you complete this curious and powerful piece?

CR: Ha again! That's a reworked California scene with simple color and shapes, an all-pink and coral painting.

Rather than adding more detail with transitions from light to dark, I kept the simple color shapes. It was fun to work with the scale shifts surrounding the small umbrella. I like the geometric abstraction and would like to use that more often.

If a viewer asks, “Are those steps? Is that a zig-zag wall? What is it?”––such questions are great.

EJ: Camellia and Warm Winter stand out with confidence and joy in painterly momentum. Warm Winter interlocks careful separate harmonies in blue and yellow, expressing a warm embrace.

Camellia is a tonal marvel of beige to grey, interrupted by small areas of dark red, grey-blue, dull green, and yellow-gold, suggesting California through the veil of an East Coast winter.

What were the solutions that finished these pieces?

CR: In both paintings my desire was to use large areas of dark against light areas and not break them up too much. Keeping unified warm color in Warm Winter with bits of blue, and using a tonal structure for Camellia, gave me confidence in my direction. I restrained myself from going off on a tangent that would disrupt the all-over harmony of the parts.

My tendency is to add, which can disrupt, but I like adding something that feels out of context. When I look at other people’s work, I like finding unexpected surprises that take me off guard: it’s exciting and makes me ask, How and why does it work? Can I do that in my paintings? Both Camellia and Warm Winter surprise in subtle ways.

–– Elizabeth Johnson
(elizabethjohnsonart.com)

edited by Matthew Crain
(@sarcastapics)

September 2026