The women/goddesses in Alisa Gabrielle’s colorful canvases are ripe, bold, sensual feminine forms that reflect themes of what it means to be a woman - vulnerable and powerful, vital, fertile and givers of life. Her images challenge the limitations of this culture’s thinking and celebrate beauty in all shapes and sizes. Alisa’s voluptuous, abstract figurative forms in marble, alabaster, clay and bronze have a dignity, elegance and eternal quality. The sensuality of her pieces beckon the viewers to want to move their hands along the full undulating feminine forms.

According to Alisa, who has been legally blind in both eyes for most of her adult life, “Art for me is much more a process of inner vision, an expression of the heart and other senses, rather than outer vision. Most of my images come from within, and are not based on a model, nor limited to realistic forms.” Her blurred vision moved her to go beyond the known to create a style of beauty that reflects women as they really are, and not how our culture wants them to be.

Alisa was legally blind (20/200) with a genetic disease called Keratoconus, where the cornea is shaped into a cone and sight is distorted and blurred. In 2001 while carving a marble piece, a chip flew into her right eye, rupturing her cornea, causing a milky blur. The only option was a corneal transplant. Since that surgery, she now sees 20/40 in her right eye with a corrective lens. She considers herself fortunate to be given the “gift” of sight in her right eye.

Alisa spent many years as a teacher and psychotherapist, immersed in the processes that touch and move the human spirit, and translated those experiences into art. In her “Psychic Sketches” she creates images in black and white that reflect themes of the human life cycle: birth, death, creation, family, evolution and souls on their journey. The lines and details create multiple images that often intermingle and blur in varying complexity ”just like our human thoughts and emotions,” and much like her vision without corrective lenses. “I call them Rorschach renderings because they lend themselves to interpretation and the viewer is constantly finding new images and figures the longer they view them.”

Alisa paints and sculpts in her Woodland Hills studio and often lectures about stone carving and creativity. But the artist says she comes alive on her trips to Pietrasanta, Italy, in the heart of Tuscany, where she buys her Carrera marble and mingles with other international artists. In this ancient town where Michelangelo used to carve, visitors to the studio will “buy a sculpture right off my carving table, says Alisa, “just as I am putting on the finishing touches!” She goes annually to this Italian city where the natural beauty of the Carrera mountains and the Mediterranean Sea “calm my spirit and inspire my creativity.” Her work has been exhibited in Italy and the U.S., and sells internationally.