Louise Croff Blake

Louise Croff Blake grew up in Lexington, Massachusetts, then moved west to attend the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma. Through the painting program, they began to find their way around Seattle’s art scene, while forging interdisciplinary connections through the liberal arts structure. Louise graduated with their Bachelor’s in painting with department honors in 2013. They also received a studio residency in Leipzig, Germany for the summer of 2013. This formative residency honed their studio practice, and gave context for contemporary art outside the Northwest.

Post-graduate, Louise continues to produce work, balanced with a career in custom framing. Their predominant media are oil on canvas, watercolor, and pen and ink. They work from a shared studio space on Capitol Hill, and have built a community through the outlets of Lion’s Main Art Collective and TUF, a collective of femme and non-binary artists working in electronic arts and music.

Louise received 2017 GAP Award Funding for Deck Out, a hand-illustrated deck of playing cards for the queer lifestyle. Deck Out is a set of functional playing cards. Louise hand-illustrated all of the face cards to reinterpret the standard gendered entities (Jack, Queen, King) for the contemporary queer lifestyle. Each suit correlates to a component of queer culture: Spades = Vigilantism, Hearts = Kink, Diamonds = Spirituality/Witchcraft, and Clubs = Nightlife. Through the project, they wanted to expand their style and mission to incorporate apparel, which is instrumental to gender presentation. In addition to Deck Out, they have begun to use fabric paint on t-shirts, and oil paint on canvas tote bags and denim jackets.