About
Paula Kirsch — Abstract Art Inspired by Water and Light
I work in the space where language runs out. My paintings are built from layers — acrylic, texture, movement — but what I’m really tracking is something older and less visible: the emotional and energetic currents that move beneath the surface of a life.
I’m drawn to what persists beneath change. Standing before the weathered walls of Italy, I recognized something I couldn’t name but immediately understood — the way time leaves its mark, how surfaces hold memory without explaining it. Water does the same thing. Light does. They’re all records of passage, of force meeting resistance, of something invisible making itself known.
That recognition is central to my practice. Abstract painting, for me, is a way of working in that same register — not illustrating ideas, but following what color, form, and surface can carry when words stop being useful.
My recent work marks a shift in how I move through that conviction — looser, more fluid, more willing to follow the paint rather than direct it. Water, Light & Memory, my current series, grew from that surrender: high-flow acrylic and acrylic ink on Yupo, where the material itself becomes a collaborator and control is beside the point. The paintings live in blues and teals and seafoam — water as I remember it, water as feeling, water as the thing that keeps moving even when you think it has stilled.
I work from my studio in Connecticut, building and destroying layers until something true emerges — not illustrating an idea, but discovering one.