I was born in San Francisco in 1969, and live and work in San Francisco's Mission District. I began painting in oil as a little kid alongside my aunt, an accomplished landscape painter, and took classes in drawing and painting at CCSF and elsewhere from the mid '80s through the 1990s . In 1999, I received the Merit Fellowship award from the San Francisco Art Institute, where I studied painting for a year under Pat Klein and briefly, Brett Reichman. Following that, circumstances took me away from painting for almost two decades. I began showing work in the spring of 2023.
There was a time when writing, which I could do on an airplane or in a parked car, filled the space in my life that not painting had left empty. I received the Atheneum Fellowship in creative nonfiction from the Attic Institute of Arts and Letters in Portland, Or. in 2018. A few essays I wrote have been published in various journals, linked to below. One of those, "Good Morning, Heartache" is cited in an open-source creative writing textbook published by Northern Iowa University in 2023 to illustrate the use of synesthesia as a descriptive mechanism.
Selected Solo Exhibitions
Selected Group Exhibitions
2024 • (Currently on view by appointment) an invitation to mercy, w/ Deirdre White and Rommel Rommo, Bane Gallery, San Francisco
2024 • re:present • group show curated by Val Carter, Third Street Gallery, Moscow, Id
2023 • upstairs downstairs • group show curated by Sylvie McClelland, San Francisco
2000 • the western show • group show curated by Alexis Georgeopolis, San Francisco Group Exhibition curated by Alexis Georgeopolis, San Francisco, 2000
Commissions
“Clane Holding a Drawing of Moose”, Commissioned by Clane Hayward
Writing
Hens & Chicks (published by Jelly Bucket, 2023, link to come)
Good Morning, Heartache, (published by North American Review, 2023)
Big Frenchy (published by Upstreet, Issue 18, 2022)
About the Herons (published in Proof That I Exist, 2021, link to come)
My Work and His Walk Through the Storm (published by ST Katherine Review, 2020)
Precious Words (published by Brevity Blog, 2020)
Statement
I am fascinated by with the interplay of identity and exposure, and find inspiration in the vulnerability we step into in relationship, whether interpersonally or in community. My paintings explore the dual acts of seeing and being seen through close examination of my subjects.
Often, random small things I find in the woods, in city parks and sidewalks, or at thrift stores become players in still life's. Birds and parts of birds in various states are a recurring mechanism, serving as stand-in protagonists in an ongoing study of the consequences of being human and alive, even as they function more traditionally as things of beauty to be contemplated.
I am primarily an oil painter, and I work in contained palette of earth tones in a naturalistic style. I paint on a variety of surfaces, and have a fondness for found or recycled wood that reflects my interest in the idea of beauty inherent in the real.
Press
San Francisco is a port city, and has been a boom town many times over. But San Francisco functions best as a playground of art, music, poetry, and spectacle. Just ask the bay Area Figuratives, the Beats and the hippies, Survival Research Laboratories. These groups made San Francisco their art-fantasy playground. Everyone knew each other and they came out for each others' shows and art.
But any movement, if enduring, produces its own outsiders. In the San Francisco of the1990's, while muralists and graffiti artists were kicking off the Mission School, Alison Alstrom, Rommel Romo and Deirdre White were smoking distorted figurative realism behind the gym. Rommel painted the iconic, oversized, oppressive chihuahuas that judged our excesses or steered colossally poor decisions while we did what we did in our favorite bar. Deirdre painted raw meat and honed her quiet subversive genius in academia, reaching a kind of pinnacle in reverse rebellion. While a fixture on the fringes, making drinks and selling books to up and coming art stars, Alison practiced painting in her bathrobe, in a tiny in-law apartment out where the 280 cuts across the southern tip of the city, rendering everything below it "excelsior."
In 2024, Alison Alstrom has curated a group show with her new work in oils along with two other Mission District artists she's admired for decades. All three are visceral painters who appreciate a sensual and demanding medium that seems to have a life of its own. All three reveal everyday contradictions that alternately evoke despair or delight. Their work is dramatic and revelatory, asking you to look closely, and then look again, to find something surprising or familiar in a bird's ribcage, a freeway overpass, the gaze of a Mexican street dog.
-press release
An Invitation to Mercy @ Bane Gallery, November 2024
