Bio

Allison Whitehouse is an artist living and working in Louisville, KY.

Growing up, she was a student in Louisville Visual Arts’ Children’s Fine Art Classes after school program, is an alumna of Manual High School’s Visual Arts Magnet (JuniorInnovator Award, Scholastic Regional and National Gold Keys), briefly attended Columbus College of Art and Design, and graduated with a BA and MA in FrenchLanguage and Literature from the University of Louisville. She has appeared in the Belknap Fall Festival and Big Four Bridge Arts Festival.

Allison’s work is bold, colorful, and often has a lively, yet dreamy expression to it. She prefers to work two-dimensionally, primarily in paints and decorative paper collage, but is adept across many mediums, including drawing and creative textiles. Over the past several years, she has been expanding her love of painting to include large scale murals, both indoors and out.

When not creating art, Allison is an art teacher in JCPS, volunteers for environmental and community causes, travels, writes, reads, hikes, enjoys tennis, volleyball, and pickleball, spends too much time in vintage stores, acts/voice acts when possible, and models for area artist workshops and classes.

Statement

I am not a minimalist.

How could I be when I find so much to be of interest? And I resist being limited by medium or subject matter; I follow my muse wherever it leads. My piece knows what it wants to be, and what it wants to be made of, even if I can’t always portray it to perfection. A piece is precisely that to me – in pieces. It’s up to me to fill in the gaps left behind by incomplete flashes of inspiration. Perhaps that can result in a lack of “consistency” from time to time, but I generally don’t like to repeat myself, in life as also in art. There is always something new to discover, to attempt, to play with, to explore.

I am not a minimalist.

Whenever I mean to simplify, I can’t help but want to add just one more detail… one more this, one more that. The play of light and color fascinates me and is essential to what I aim to capture, along with a sense of drama and whimsy. I am ever hunting for “the pop,” that moment when the piece bursts at last to life. Those qualities remain constant across my work even if the style or medium changes. Even if my subject is something real, I must transform it into something unreal.

I am not a minimalist.