Blake Aaseby

BLAKE AASEBY

Blake Aaseby (b. 1991) is a contemporary visual artist based in the San Francisco Bay Area whose practice focuses on themes of memory, place, and the shifting nature of personal and collective landscapes. Working primarily in carved oil paintings and textile-inspired pastel drawings, Aaseby’s work reflects his nomadic, suburban upbringing—a childhood he describes as “a floating root system.” His layered, tactile approach to mark-making explores the impermanence of place and the invisible lines connecting people to environments, memories, and histories.

Aaseby earned his MFA in Painting and Drawing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a BFA in Studio Art from Azusa Pacific University. His work has been exhibited in galleries and institutions across the United States, including the de Young Museum in San Francisco.

Using techniques that include impasto oil applications, hand-carved tools, and layered color fields, Aaseby creates compositions that blur the boundaries between abstraction and cartography. His pieces serve as meditations on the intersection of memory and place—acts of archiving not through documentation, but through sensation and visual rhythm.

Through his deeply textural and contemplative work, Blake Aaseby invites viewers to consider how we trace, lose, and reimagine the places we call home. His art becomes a map—not of geography—but of emotional and experiential terrain.