Meet the artist and founder

I am Carissa Armstrong — a multidisciplinary artist and lifelong educator whose work lives at the threshold between the seen and the unseen, painting the cosmos as a portal to what persists beyond physical form. At the heart of everything I make is a single conviction: that creation is a divine act, and that art is among the most honest languages we have for exploring what we cannot fully speak.

My work explores the luminosity of consciousness after loss — the idea that who we are does not end, but transforms. Like light, we bend, reflect, scatter into everything around us, and never truly disappear. I paint what I have come to understand as portraits of souls: nonrepresentational organic and geometric forms rendered in white line, built beneath layer upon layer of transparent pigment, iridescent and interference colors, pearl powders, metallics, and light-reflecting gems and crystals. These are not decorative choices. They are the metaphor made physical — materials chosen because they do what I believe souls do: they hold light, they shift depending on how you look at them, and in the dark, they glow.

“I think of these paintings as stars under the same sky — a way for people to remain connected to a lost loved one. Open your eyes in the dark and see the silhouette of that soul, still present, still radiant.”

I make this work for the grieving, the searching, and anyone who has stood in the dark and wondered if love has an edge. The phosphorescent layers of my paintings are intentional: grief deepens at night, and I want someone to open their eyes and find a painting quietly glowing back.

I work in acrylic, building transparency upon transparency — a process that mirrors its subject. Meaning accrues slowly. What lies underneath continues to shape what appears on the surface. The cosmos I paint is not purely astronomical. It is the space between what we know and what we sense, the place where science and spirit stop arguing and simply look up together.