Rachel Weiswasser is a New York City based painter. She started painting as a teenager after a visit to an art supply store in upstate New York with her dad. She was drawn to chalk pastels and the way color could be layered, either blended into softness or left raw and broken. That early attention to material and color still shapes her approach.

Weiswasser paints bodies, but not in a symbolic or idealized way. Her interest comes from personal experience: living with epilepsy and undergoing open-heart surgery. She became deeply aware of the body’s instability, fragility, and weight. Painting is her way of staying present, giving form to sensation, memory, and physicality that cannot always be described.

She works in oil and uses a pointillist approach. She builds forms through repeated dabs, marks, and layered patches of color. Weiswasser paints abstracted realism, but detaches meaning by squinting at the image to reduce it to its basic shapes and tonal relationships. This allows her to bypass any learned associations and focus on what is visually in front of her.

Her palette varies intentionally: sometimes her parameters include working with two or three colors, other times she uses a multitude of colors. She avoids blending on the palette and instead lets colors mix optically on the canvas through layering. Forms often shift, fragment, or dissolve.

Weiswasser is in private collections worldwide and has exhibited multiple times in New York and California. She graduated from NYU with a degree in Art History and Creative Writing.

Weiswasser holds an MA in Art History from University College London. There she focused on visual culture, gender, and the history of how bodies—especially women’s—have been imaged and controlled. Her painting is informed by that history, but not defined by it. She returns to images like those from Paris, Texas not to make a statement, but to work through the visual logic embedded in them—letting paint challenge, obscure, or reframe what was previously fixed.