Serena Weits

Serena Weits is a multi-disciplinary artist from the Detroit, Michigan area. She graduated from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), where she earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts. Alongside her practice as a fine artist, Serena has spent the last 27 years as a professional Photo Stylist. Using her skills in painting, composition and attention to details, to bring editorial and commercial photoshoots to life. After many years working and showing artwork in Chicago, Serena and her family arrived in Milwaukee in 2010 and she has been exhibiting her artwork regionally.

She is known for her deeply personal paintings, collages and installations. Serena has collections of yellowed dictionary and thesaurus pages, field guides for trees, wildflowers and birds, medical diagrams, indexes, patterned paper, stamps, illustrations for building a birdhouse or fixing a car. She selects from this wealth of paper ephemera and uses it as the first layer of her compositions. It may get painted over, or bits may still show through in the finished piece. Her work begins subconsciously at first to tap into her emotions as well as the season and colors of her environment. There are thousands of tiny decisions while creating an artwork and she brings these collage elements together with the painted imagery in a harmony of eye-tickling details with new correlations, both visually and conceptually. Her interests lie in the constellations of inter-connected human relationships as well as those between our fellow flora and fauna here on Earth. The natural world continues in its cycles whether it is in our human consciousness or not. Her work highlights the fleeting beauty of the natural world while the silhouetted figures that reoccur in numerous artworks delve into the powerful, abstracted subconscious mind that communicates through feelings and metaphor.

Serena uses a variety of different media, from traditional art-making supplies to found objects; manmade and organic. She regularly combs the beaches of Lake Michigan and organizes objects she finds by color and size to be used in future installations. Her commitment to her artistic practice and the beauty she finds in her world she hopes will resonate with viewers. The collected items in Serena's works become lovely visual components as well as symbolic threads representing the seen and unseen bonds that tie us all together. For inquiries about the artwork please email serenaweits@gmail.com

See more of her work on Instagram.