[7] Stylistically, her paintings have been described as ranging from completely flat to rendering deep pictorial space, blending abstraction and figuration and going back and forth between the two.

[8] In the late 1990s, Essenhigh's work attracted attention as one of a generation of young painters in New York, including Cecily Brown, Damien Loeb and Will Cotton.

For Essenhigh, these changes in materials not only differed aesthetically, but pointed to clear references in art history: “I stopped painting in oil for a time and started using enamel.

I needed to drop all the baggage that comes with oil paint and do something completely contemporary, which I found in the slick, bright, flat surfaces of enamels.”[16] Essenhigh has most recently moved back to enamel painting, but completed in such a manner as to retain the qualities of light found in her earlier work with oil (as seen in Midsummer Night’s Dream, enamel on canvas, 2017).

Maybe I can start to form the world that I want to live in.”[19] Mythology, landscape and the urban versus pastoral are recurring motifs in her work, although Essenhigh does not limit herself by subject.