Born in Portland, Oregon in 1961, Kris Haas is a self-taught visual artist whose practice is rooted in the language of abstraction. For Haas, abstraction is not a departure from reality but an entry point into deeper truths—where gesture, material, and texture communicate what words cannot. Guided by instinct and physical presence, her paintings emerge through layering, disruption, and reassembly, revealing the unstable yet profoundly human terrain of memory and perception.
Her series unfold as distinct yet interwoven explorations of abstraction’s possibilities. Disjointed Reality transforms collage painting into fractured, rhythmic architectures of form, echoing the challenge of coherence in a fractured world. Displaced Memories engages abstraction as a vessel for the mutable nature of recollection—layered surfaces that resist permanence while carrying emotional resonance. In Of & Being and Intervals of Being, abstraction becomes an act of becoming itself, with gestural fields and intuitive marks evoking states of consciousness, intimacy, and interior life. Tactile Commodity expands this vocabulary into material contradiction, where burlap, cloth, sand, and paint collide, heightening abstraction’s ability to hold both fragility and raw physicality.
Haas’s art is less about representation than about presence—the act of creating as excavation and revelation. Her works have been commissioned for high-profile spaces in Washington, D.C., featured in national television series, and collected in private and corporate settings. Through abstraction, she offers viewers not resolution but an invitation: to dwell within ambiguity, to witness rupture, and to discover beauty and resilience in the layered, unfinished surfaces of being.
Welcome to my online gallery. Here you will find all works created by me and below an ‘About’ page that tells you a little more about me, my life and what is the passion behind what I do to create all these amazing works of art.
When you are buying a piece of art from me, whether it is a painting, drawing or collage, you are buying a piece of my life. A piece of my history, her story. A piece of my emotions, my feelings, my experiences of what I go through. As a survivor of a Traumatic Brain Injury (I have had four concussions) my life did an abrupt halt and so I had to listen. Listen to the changes and move with them instead of always fighting against them. Here you see my joy, my pain, my liveliness, my sorrow, my beauty, my determination, my will power, my darkness and yes my lightness. It is an honest life. A life well lived and despite loosing my life I had, my house, my home, my job and even being homeless for a while, I wouldn’t take it back for anything in the world because it has brought me here, to you. The you who is reading this and I welcome you into my world of creativity and I look forward to sending you one of my original works of art!!
THIS IS WHAT BEING A Brain Injured, 60 year old, woman artist looks like - INEXHAUSTIBLE, UNSTOPPABLE CREATIVITY!
More and more words can escape me so when the thoughts come in verbal form inside my mind I know I have to stop and listen and write it down because it is important.
The reason why I say that more and more words have a tendency to escape me is because ever since my accident, on February 26th, 2004 words and me have grown apart, with less in common and the visual language has become my nearest and dearest friend that keeps me company, even in my darkest hours, which there have be many.
Through the hardships in my life, from the divorce, then later partner leaving the relationship, loosing the life I had before my accident, my day job that supported me and my work, the house, then apartment and most of my belongings, and even being homeless for a while, but despite all of this, my work is the one constant thing in my life, my creativity. It has been my friend, my companion even my lover at times and it is what drove me to become a better artist, a better person in which I constantly expand the ways and techniques in which I create, ALWAYS!
Because of it I have been able to further enhance the strength of my feminine side which has become even more complex than I ever could have imagined. By nature my curiosity is insatiable and my work can be very physical at times with it always evolving, intuitively. In a way having the Brain Injury and allowing certain aspects of my life to succumb to my limitations, I choose to embrace them and at times move side by side cohesively with the knowledge I gain from my experiences of being an artist/creative with The Invisible Disability.
So with that said here is my work, my story, in the language I know best!