In Doom & Bloom, Lisa Ericson conjures a world both radiant and doomed. Her hyperrealistic acrylic paintings—now on view at Corey Helford Gallery in Los Angeles—inhabit that fragile intersection where beauty meets ecological catastrophe. Known for her astonishing technical precision and surreal imagination, the Portland-based artist crafts intricate portraits of hybrid creatures—foxes stranded on flowering stumps, turtles carrying coral kingdoms, fish trailed by living reefs—each rendered with the emotional gravity of a vanitas and the hallucinatory clarity of a dream.

Ericson’s art, however, does more than seduce the eye. Beneath its luminous surfaces lies a quiet reckoning with the climate crisis, specifically the rising sea levels that erode not only coastlines but also the boundaries between life forms. Her imagined species—amphibious, symbiotic, and oddly serene—speak to an ecological interdependence that feels both inevitable and tragic.

I think of the animals in my paintings as simultaneously representing the natural world and our own human struggle and emotion, I like to draw parallels between the two.

– Ericson says.

Light, Darkness, and the Drama of Survival

Each painting unfolds against a pitch-black background, a void that heightens both isolation and intimacy.

I use the black background to create the drama of the spotlight, It singles out my subject, exposes their every tiny detail, and creates a void of the unknown around them.

– Ericson explains.

This chiaroscuro effect recalls the theatrical precision of Caravaggio as much as the surreal luminescence of contemporary digital renderings.

Her technical process is painstaking. Working exclusively in acrylic on wood panels, Ericson builds her images in multiple translucent layers, using minute liner brushes to capture the finest textures of fur, feather, and scale. Each painting takes three weeks to three months to complete, depending on its scale and complexity. The result is an uncanny precision that transforms realism into revelation: every drop of water, every tendril of seaweed becomes a testament to fragility.

In Chariot, a turtle trudges across an invisible expanse, its shell bearing a miniature ecosystem—grasses, coral, and monarchs—like an ark of impossible survival. In Edge of Night, a fox perches on a tree stump blooming with pink coneflowers, surrounded by the rising tide. The beauty of these works is piercing, their emotional register hovering between elegy and hope.

Between Science and Surrealism

Ericson’s ideas often emerge from scientific phenomena, filtered through a lens of imagination.

I may read about an environmental issue and it provides a kernel of inspiration.

– She notes.

The resulting imagery—half-researched, half-mythic—echoes the way nature itself blurs boundaries between logic and wonder.

Her hybrid species, sometimes playful (as in her mouser-flies, winged rodents that hover in still darkness) and sometimes ominous, represent “collective frontiers”—the thresholds where ecosystems merge, collapse, or evolve. By recombining familiar parts, she births what she calls “beautifully abhorrent travelers”: creatures that shouldn’t exist, but must.

This act of imaginative recombination is not mere fantasy; it is ecological storytelling. Ericson’s work captures what scientists call the Anthropocene uncanny—that growing awareness that our human presence has rewired the natural order. Her hybrids suggest not extinction but adaptation through mutation, a Darwinian fable rendered in jewel-toned acrylics.

From Yale to the Pacific Northwest: A Practice of Precision

A graduate of Yale University, Ericson first pursued a career in illustration and graphic design before returning to painting full-time. This background infuses her canvases with a graphic intensity—clean lines, high contrast, and a compositional clarity rarely seen in fine art. Her choice of materials—Golden and Liquitex acrylics on rigid panels—further sharpens the edges of her meticulous brushwork, while her color palette vibrates with a digital-like glow, as if nature itself had become pixelated.

Her studio practice, however, remains profoundly analog: the layering of paint, the decay of brushes, the slow alchemy of detail.

I buy brushes in bulk, because I’m hard on them. They lose their precise points so fast.

– She laughs.

This devotion to material craft grounds the fantastical imagery in physical labor—a reminder that every luminous surface is built through endurance.

Beauty as Resistance

The title Doom & Bloom encapsulates the paradox at the heart of Ericson’s art. Her paintings mourn ecological loss, yet they refuse despair. The lush color, the tenderness of her brush, the improbable symbiosis of her subjects—all suggest that beauty remains a form of resistance, a way of seeing through grief.

Ericson’s world is one where survival and splendor coexist, where even as seas rise, life adapts in unexpected, luminous ways. Her art whispers an uncomfortable truth: that the apocalypse, too, can be breathtaking.

In Lisa Ericson’s Doom & Bloom, the natural world becomes both mirror and oracle—reflecting our peril, yet illuminating the resilience that endures beneath the waves.