Lisa Blai is a painter based in Los Angeles.

Working in a variety of mediums, the artist’s works—past and present—explore notions of repetition, fragility, and voyeurism.

Her current project, San Marino Gothic, features a group of paintings focusing on the unquestioned privacy and exclusion that both wealth and private property bring within the landscape of an upper-class neighborhood. San Marino, a small city just north of Los Angeles, represents just such a neighborhood, with large houses set upon expansive lawns that cost an average of 3.5 million dollars.

The artist’s process for the project starts by entering San Marino at dusk. As the day slides into twilight, cracks in privacy emerge. Blai takes pictures of houses when windows are illuminated and before curtains are shut; in a landscape of abundant security systems and social mores, taking voyeuristic pictures of multi-million dollar homes is an act of defiance in and of itself. The houses become darker and more ominous as night fully takes hold. It is these pictures, shot between twilight and darkness, that become inspiration for oil paintings.

The paintings embody a haunted loneliness, with somber, towering trees and foliage, devoid of the owners who are behind closed doors. Blai draws inspiration from Ed Ruscha's Silhouette Series of the late 1980s, as well as Lois Dodd's night home paintings.

Blai holds a B.A. from the University of California, Los Angeles and an M.A. from the University of California, Irvine.