I’m uncomfortable most of the time. As a painter and puppeteer, this truth is unavoidable. To manipulate a puppet is to make a puppet do a task, which it might not wish to do. The figures in my painting do not thrive; they follow the constraints I put on them. Like me, they are resigned to circumstances. 

I use oil pastels and crayons to lay down the lines of my paintings, simultaneously building up large forms of color. My recent work has been on paper, a substrate that inherently has a flesh-like tendency to wrinkle and fold. The existing imperfections of the paper allow me to lay down my lines and colors more decisively, while I build up the image quickly to capture the feeling of the action rather than its representation. Layering is integral to my process, and only when I make these many nuanced decisions can my work settle into the strange world of the familiar.

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Elise Kleinbauer (b. 2003, Boston, MA) is based in Brooklyn, NY. She received her B.F.A. in Painting from Pratt Institute in 2026.