About

Colby Blake (°1990, Boston, United States) constructs paintings and conceptual works that dissect the unstable architectures of meaning—those we cling to amid chaos, grief, and the absurd theater of existence. Her practice is rooted in oil, a medium she first embraced in 2017 within the charred husk of a Brooklyn building, one of several transient studios she would later call “the fireplaces.” These spaces, marked by impermanence and rebirth, became laboratories for her exploration of beauty in ruin and the alchemy of survival.

Blake’s abstractions are rituals of resistance. Using oil’s visceral tactility—its capacity to smolder, pool, and scar—she layers and erases, creating surfaces that feel excavated rather than painted. A single work might cradle the ghost of a gesture beneath strata of pigment, echoing the fragility of memory or the stubborn persistence of myth. Titles like “come. Sir. Come. Stance.” and “pentagram entrance exam” act as conceptual flares, illuminating the absurdity of power structures, rites of passage, and the systems we devise to tame chaos. They are not explanations, but provocations: linguistic knots meant to unravel assumptions about value, hierarchy, and the stories we tell ourselves to endure.

Raised on a partial Massachusetts farm, where the wild entropy of nature collided with Boston’s urban order, Blake’s work thrives in liminality. Her paintings oscillate between violence and tenderness, the bureaucratic and the primal. In “the riptide of grief” (a title borrowed from her ongoing interrogation of loss), oil’s slow-drying nature becomes a metaphor for the nonlinear work of mourning—a process that stains, resurfaces, and refuses to resolve.

“The fireplaces” (her nomadic studios) are both method and metaphor. Like the buildings that housed them, Blake’s works are palimpsests: remnants of collapse that insist on regeneration. She works on reclaimed wood, linen, and canvas, materials that bear the scars of prior lives, merging her medium’s history with her own.

Currently, she explores how scale distorts intimacy, from vast panels that envelop viewers in chromatic tides to miniature studies where oil’s lushness becomes claustrophobic. At the core of her practice lies a question: *What if chaos is not a void, but a dialect?* Her art offers no answers—only the quiet revolution of a flame stubbornly lit in the rubble.