Vanessa Lemen

From the artist, with Art Renewal Center 2022

Vanessa Lemen is an award-winning painter based in Carlsbad, CA. Her paintings are layered in subtle allegory, with an explorative process that intertwines realism and imagination to depict humanity, metaphor and story. Much like the spontaneity of a dialogue, the marks on the surface are what evoke a response and then a discovery, the possibility of something new to form. Each piece she creates seems to come from a chaos, and in it, she is able to create a place of reflection and curiosity, a balance of the deep-seated and the unknown, with areas of rest and of movement that intertwine to form a calm amid the chaos.

Her work has been published in the Illustrated Limited Edition books: The Left Hand Of Darkness by Ursula K LeGuin and A Scanner Darkly by Philip K. Dick. Her works have also been published in art books such as Spectrum and Infected By Art, and she has been featured in articles in magazine such as American Art Collector, ImagineFX, and PoetsArtists. Lemen also writes monthly columns for the Muddy Colors blog, and is an educator who mentors privately, teaches classes online, and instructs at workshops across the US. Her work has earned her The Chesley Award as well as numerous awards in the Art Renewal Center Salons, exhibiting at Sotheby’s NY, Sotheby’s Los Angeles, the European Museum of Modern Art (MEAM), Rehs Contemporary Galleries, NYC, NY, among other locations.