Lisa McShane Art

Peaches in the Kitchen. Oil on Canvas. 11 x 14. $240- Peaches on my kitchen counter. Still delicious.

Many Cherries. Oil on Canvas. 9 x 12. Rainier and Lapin Cherries on my windowsill. Yesterday was the hottest day ever where I live. Hot. But this morning is perfect in the studio and I'm finishing several paintings I started earlier this week. This is one.

Hills at Dusk. Oil on Canvas. 9 x 12. $180. I finished this painting today. I'd started it several months ago. It has layers and layers of glazes which made it hard to photograph.

Peaches on Spode Platter. Oil on Canvas. 11 x 14. $240. Thursday night my cousin's family came to visit with a box of peaches. It's Sunday and I'm still painting those peaches (there are more peach paintings coming.) Let me just say that millions of peaches = billions of fruit flies. This is my favorite platter for serving cheese to my friends. If you've had appetizers at my house, you've seen this platter.

2 Apricots, 2 Cherries. Oil on Gessoboard. 5 x 7. $90.

One Peach. Oil on Canvas. 7 x 5. My cousin's family came to visit yesterday from eastern Washington and they brought a box of ripe peaches. I love peaches. I think I'll make a cobbler tomorrow.

Rival Apricots, Lapin Cherries. Oil on Canvas. 9 x 12. $180- There was beautiful produce at the Community Food Coop yesterday and I bought a few Rival apricots and Lapin cherries to paint this morning. Out the window I can see a tree, sarcococca and a golden barberry. Since the barberry is growing in the shade of a maple tree, it's chartreuse, not gold. Regardless, it's only vaguely painted and I may rework the windows tomorrow. I may spend more time thinking about the balance of color in this one.

Jude and The Apricots 2. Oil on Gessoboard. 12 x 9. $180. This morning when I went to the studio the still life from yesterday was still on the windowsill. Today the bud behind the larger flower was opening and the big flower fully open. The apricots are fading and a little flatter. It's hot out and they've been sitting in my studio for two days now. I liked them all even better and painted them again.

Jude and the Apricots. Oil on Canvas. 10 x 8. $150- This is a Jude the Obscure Rose, one of the David Austin English roses. Couple of great things about this one: it blooms mid-July when many roses are resting or done, and it has an incredible fragrance. Fruit, vanilla, with a bit of classic rose - lovely and strong but not overly sweet. It's a globular shape, deep gold stamens inside, and this enchanting apricot color. Pictured here with the same apricots from the previous painting. They're a little riper and thus redder. The rose is in a Twin Brooks Dairy cream bottle. We're just around the corner from Nelson's Market in Bellingham and they carry Twin Brooks milk from a Whatcom County dairy. I love walking to the store to get local milk in a glass bottle. Better quality, smaller carbon footprint - all good.

Two Apricots. Oil on Canvas. 8 x 10. $150. Apricots are in season in eastern Washington! This has always been one of my favorite fruits and I have them all to myself at my house. I like them fresh, then they make the very best jam, and dried, it's my favorite hiking snack. Bonus: very fun to paint.

Three Rainiers. Oil on Gessoboard. 7 x 5. $90.

Rainier Cherries. Oil on Gessoboard. 5 x 7. More cherries! Yum!

4 Rainier Cherries. Oil on Gessoboard. 5 x 7. A late afternoon painting of the Rainier cherries. It's hard to paint them and not simply sit in the backyard eating these.

2 Pairs of Rainiers. Oil on Canvas. 5 x 7. SOLD Cherrypalooza 2009 continues. I LOVE Rainier cherries.

Five Cherries. Oil on Gessoboard. 5 x 7. The interplay of shadows beneath the cherries interests me. My studio has a glass door facing west. It was cloudy when I was painting yesterday but early evening the sun came out briefly and cast shadows beneath the cherries.

I Dream of Erratics. Oil on Canvas. 14 x 28. This painting is of a field of erratics on the Waterville Plateau. The erratics are large rocks left when the continental ice sheet stopped here after moving south from Canada. In the growing season there is hay in this field but in the winter, with the ice, fog and snow, the large rocks stand out. My husband is a geologist and we love to drive through these desolate, beautiful landscapes.

The Alexandra Rose 3. Oil on Canvas. 10 x 8. The third painting of The Alexandra Rose. Despite a little rain, summer is in full swing here. There are many flowers and the beans and onions are ripe.

The Alexandra Rose 2. Oil on Gessoboard. 5 x 7. This is The Alexandra Rose, a single rose that grows in small and elegant clusters in a very shady area of my garden. The flowers are edged in copper with a yellow center when they open, but quickly fade to a sweet pink. I had a full weekend of painting, which is good because I have to report for Jury Duty this week. I've packed a sketchbook, pencils, my iPhone and a book. I have the Brushes app on my iPhone and have seen interesting work by artists recently using that app. If they turn out, I'll post them.

Three Cherries. Oil on Gessoboard. 5 x 7. Washington state has the biggest crop of cherries ever. The season should go on for another month and I plan to paint a lot of cherry paintings.

Four Cherries. Oil on Gessoboard. 5 x 7. My birthday was Thursday and my sister Ellen came to visit. She brought cherries! Her husband manages orchards in eastern Washington and so I learned that fresh cherries have green stems. If the stem has brown spots, or is completely brown, then it's been awhile since it was picked. These are mostly brown by now.

Some is not a number, soon is not a time. That's a line from political campaigns, where work is tracked hourly/daily/weekly so you make sure you reach all the voters you need to talk to. I like to track things. Love spreadsheets & databases. This is a shot of my storage attic in my studio. I just finished gessoing a pile of canvas that I'd stretched in May. Last week I received a shipment of gessoboards and small canvases. On hand: 57 canvases and gessoboards ready to go This year: 68 paintings painted plus 11 that are in progress and another 4 that shall never see the light of day Just like in my previous work, I like to track my progress with things I can measure. What's in my studio attic - that's something I can measure. How my work is progressing? That's a little more subjective.

Clematis durandii. Oil on Gessoboard. 7 x 5. My garden is in the Relay for Life garden tour here in Bellingham in a couple of weeks. As a result, I'm more focused than usual on flowers. My studio is lined with these little flower portraits right now. This is a shrubby Clematis. What that really means is it's a short vine that needs to be next to an actual shrub in order to do more than sprawl horizontally on the ground. This one is next to the Rugosa rose I painted last week so they grow as a pair. This clematis has remarkable navy blue flowers. Few flowers are this deep blue color. With the tan to gold stamens and the large flowers, it's something right now. Some plant pairings are magical, some functional and this is the latter. The prickles of the Rugosa are exactly right for a reluctant vine to scramble up. It's in a little juice glass, one my sister Ellen gave me. The glass arrived with red roosters on it. This one is my husband's favorite glass for red wine so...

We went on the Bellingham Gallery Walk last night and it was one of the most beautiful evenings I've seen here. It was so warm that we didn't need a sweater at night! Very unusual. But what was especially great was seeing good art and meeting several of our local artists here in the northwest corner of the U.S. Julia Clifford was painting at the iGallery on State Street. She has a new and wonderfully large painting and was working on the first layers of color. I really enjoyed the vibrant colors and shapes. Then at the Blue Horse Gallery I met Laurie Potter . I'd been hoping to meet her. Her show of large pastels had just wrapped up but you can still see these incredible pieces there. There's one called Japanese Maple that I absolutely love. We chatted for a while and it was lots of fun. Down the hall at works on canvas studio and gallery , Sharon Kingston had some amazing abstracts on display. I absolutely loved two paintings: one abstract on the stairs and a large p...

Pink Rugosa. Oil on Canvas. 10 x 8. This is a Ritausma Rose, a Rugosa. It's a fantastic, sweetly scented and freely flowering rose. One of my husband's favorites. My roses are not grafted, they grow on their own roots, and so with a rose like Ritausma, it has cool thick brown stalks shooting up from the ground. I've had it for 3 years and in another two, it will be a wonderful thicket. The thicket makes the following happy: my husband, the birds, the neighbors and all the people who walk by on the sidewalk.

Roses and Milk Jar. Oil on Canvas. 14 x 11. This is a small painting of a David Austin English rose, Jude the Obscure, with the lovely Duchesse de Nemours peony. What great flowers! With summer in full swing, I've been painting flowers this week. The milk jar is a bonus of where I live. There's a great corner store a block away that carries milk in glass jars from a local organic dairy. I always have one or two on the kitchen counter waiting to be traded in for a full container.

Erratic and the Road. Oil on Canvas. 18 x 24 I've been working on the Plateau in Winter series. This is an area - the Waterville Plateau in northcentral Washington state - where the continental ice sheet came to rest after scraping across North America. It left behind fields of erratics and some notably large ones. I'm fascinated by this image and you'll likely see this again. Note the scale of the telephone poles across the road.