Riley Strom
Teaching Artist
Riley Strom is an oil painter from Los Angeles. She received her BA from Sarah Lawrence, and earned her MFA from Tyler School of Art at Temple University. In addition to her studio work, Riley has shared her talents with the community in CFAER’s “Loosening up With Ink” workshop, and she also oversees our new Drawing Lab which launched in January 2021. As an artist she thinks a lot about the relationship between an image and the world it is representing. How can a still image contain the complexity of a lived experience? In her paintings she wants to communicate the sense of energy, motion, and time that exists in living things. Her artistic process starts with observation. Music, people she meets, food, stories she’s told or read, found photographs, poetry, or pieces of trash are all potential subjects to paint. The paintings dip in and out of representation, figuration, and abstraction. She is interested to watch how her work is informed by her ever changing environment, mood, as well as the larger societal socio-economic and political circumstances.