The white “Coolaire Co.” sign has faded into the redbrick, and the stern little square building on Hodiamont looks like a home for industrial ghosts. Then the gate swings open, and Alicia LaChance invites you in the back way—to a skylit, color-splashed studio. Walls of shelves hold paint cans, books, and a bright “boneyard” of mistakes she’ll rework.
LaChance learned years ago to free up, experiment, hold herself only to her own standards. Originally a fashion designer, she painted landscapes from old English auction catalogs, using art as a way to stay home with her daughter and twin sons. “That wasn’t really getting me anywhere,” she says, “although I loved painting them.” So she loosened up, found her own, fresher language—and had an instant audience.
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The turning point was a big canvas she’d work on in the studio “then strap it to the top of my car, take it home, put it on the living room floor, and study it. I was obsessed. When that painting was done, I felt like I had finally made something that was truly my own.”
Eight years ago, LaChance found this building. It’s owned by Pat and Carol Schuchard, who are reviving Bevo Mill, and it gives her even more room to play.
On one table is the brilliantly colored foundation of Walking City, commissioned by a client in London. “It’s a maximalist piece,” she explains. “I’ll wind up creating three paintings that read through each other.” At the moment it’s a patchwork of glimpsed nature and architectural texture, with flower blossoms exploding like firecrackers.
“I’ll use anything to make a mark,” she says, grinning. “I’ll freehand and use Q-tips or objects from the street or antique sign-painting tools.” How did she get the twigs so…twiggy? “I paint them with string. Once I didn’t have any brushes—I literally couldn’t afford them—so I ripped a piece of string off the back of the canvas and let gravity do the work. Now I use that to render a lot of botanicals.”
On the studio’s opposite end waits one of the largest flatbed lithographic presses in the country—“a first-edition Peter Marcus,” she bubbles. She rented an engine hoist and inveigled her sons’ help to move the 2-ton press to her studio, where she scrubbed away the rust.
“I always fascinate over old theater and wine posters,” she says. “I love the idea of doing something of that old-world quality in a 21st-century design language.” She also wants to print work by artists represented at her Maplewood gallery, Hoffman LaChance Contemporary.
“They’re the real deal,” she says. “They’ll come and live in the gallery for a week,” prepping an exhibit. “You walk in and you can smell the sweat and the wet paint. It’s not as polished as other places, but it’s been a touchstone.”
LaChance has work hanging in Asia and Russia; she researched sacred geometry and created 15 huge mandala-esque paintings for a five-star hotel in Abu Dhabi. Lately she’s been painting luminous panels of color, trying to get the paint to behave in new ways, and “projecting light through different parabolic structures, trying to throw color without any canvas at all.” Her goal is to create works of art that—like a cool workspace—“are meant to be experienced, not possessed.”
