Rachel Weiswasser (b. 1998) 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, where 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 with that—of giving form to sensation, memory, and physical presence that can’t always be described.

​

She works in oil using a pointillist approach, building forms through repeated dabs, marks, and layered patches of color. She usually begins with a reference, 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’s visually in front of her.

​

Her palette varies intentionally: sometimes she limits herself to just two or three colors; other times, she pushes herself to use every color available. She avoids blending on the palette and instead lets colors mix optically on the canvas through layering. Forms often shift, fragment, or dissolve—less as a stylistic choice and more as a result of the painting process itself.

​

Weiswasser holds an MA in Art History from University College London, where 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.

​

She paints to stay with a moment. To feel something fully before it slips away. Her work doesn’t aim to resolve or explain—it’s about looking, sensing, and staying inside the experience of having a body.