Greta Waller

Greta Waller is driven by her passion for exploring and understanding the nature of light and color. Painting only from life, Waller embraces the gritty and unromanticized corners of her own life, painting each with incredible aptitude and a haunting beauty. Waller sees the world from a unique perspective and uses her artistic practice and her skill in paint handling to come to terms with her distinctive reality. From her fascination with transformations of ice, to her experiments with the nature of light and color, or her still life paintings, each composition is arresting both visually and conceptually.

Waller’s subjects serve as vehicles to investigate light’s fleeting and variable properties. For over a decade, Waller's primary and ongoing interest is the subject of ice. In her Ice Block Paintings, Waller places a block of ice on a plate, and then races to capture the light refracting within the melting block. She masterfully reveals a full spectrum of colors that move through the ice and its surfaces in her hot studio. She also paints her more mundane milieu, like closets, cuisine and corners of her home, transforming them into painterly wonders that can feel Old World in style, but distinctly of the present in subject matter. Waller also paints in plein air to render her familiar surroundings, like the hazy or twinkling cityscape of Los Angeles, rocky California shoals and cactus-studded deserts.

Greta Waller was born in Indianapolis, Indiana in 1983, and earned her Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of Los Angeles, CA in 2011. In 2006, she completed her Bachelor of Fine Arts at Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, New York. From 2002 to 2004, Waller participated in a variety of summer and exchange programs including those at Chelsea College of Arts and Slade School of Fine Art in London, Pratt Institute in Brooklyn and the New York Academy of Art in Manhattan. Waller has participated in several select summer and exchange programs, including the Chelsea College of Arts and Slade School of Fine Art in London, Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, and the New York Academy of Art in Manhattan. Waller has been subject to solo exhibitions at Tayloe Piggott Gallery, Jackson, WY; Del Deo & Barzune, New York, NY; and Michael Maloney Fine Art, Los Angeles, CA. In 2017, Waller was invited to participate in the Invitational Exhibition of Visual Arts at The American Academy of Arts and Letters, was chosen as an Art Award winner. Waller has also participated in group exhibitions at the Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX;  Fernberger Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; PHIL, Los Angeles, CA; Michael Maloney Fine Art, Los Angeles, CA; Tayloe Piggott Gallery, Jackson, WY; Heaven Gallery, Chicago, IL; and Chandler Gallery, Mill Valley, CA, among others. Waller lives and works in Los Angeles.