 Elise Asher Kunitz is primarily known as Elise Asher
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This biography from the Archives of AskART:
|  Born in Chicago at the height of the Chicago Literary Renaissance, Elise Asher began her creative career writing poetry, which culminated in a collection titled "The Meandering Absolute." In the 1940's she moved to Greenwich Village in New York and immersed herself in the community of artists there.
Eventually she tried her hand at painting, creating mystical landscapes in a vivid palette, and was pleased at the way she could transcend language by applying brush to canvas. Using her poetry as inspiration, Asher experimented with the connection between word and image, literally scribbling bits of text through her paintings, striving to capture the myth and memories conjured in her poems. In some works, she painted her mysterious illegible script on transparent plexiglass panels, along with curious amphibious and birdlike forms, giving her work a fantasy quality halfway between the gesture of Abstract Expressionism and Surrealism.
Asher has explained her process as an attempt to "translate the poetry of existence, its beauty and its terror, into a vocabulary of the visual imagination. This painted transformation seeks a more than usual state of being, the condition of otherness."
Her work is held in collections at the Corcoran Gallery, Washington, DC, the National Academy of Sciences, Washington, DC, and the University of California Art Museum, Berkeley, CA., among many other institutions.
Asher is the wife of the poet Stanley Kunitz.
Source: "American Women Artists" by Charlotte Streifer Rubinstein
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