Lisa McShane Art

Blanchard in the Clouds. ©2011 Lisa McShane. Oil on Linen Panel. 15" x 15". As the new year comes to a close the drizzle coats my skylights and I'm focused on finishing paintings of winter in the Northwest. This is what I often see to the west when I head home - the sun slipping under the clouds just beyond Blanchard Mountain, with the oyster gray clouds piling up overhead. Blanchard Mountain was an area I worked to protect for a number of years and it holds great meaning to me.

The Milwaukee Art Museum has a really interesting contemporary exhibit and then European art on their main floor. We went up to the second floor where there was more interesting (and some ordinary) modern art and folk art. My son checked out the basement and reported that there was nothing to see there. Since I hadn't seen any 19th century American art in the museum I asked him if there was anything that I would like downstairs. "Maybe..." In addition to the Inness there was this by Frederic Church. I really like the composition and color of this one. A Passing Shower . Frederic Edwin Church. 1860. Oil on canvas. But one of my favorite pieces in the museum was on the main floor. I went back 3 times to look again: Madonna and Child . Nardo di Cione. ca. 1350. Tempera and gold leaf on panel. Gorgeous saturated colors, lovely skin, all in remarkable condition. It takes my breath away.

Sunset in Georgia. George Inness. 1890. Oil on canvas board. Thanksgiving weekend my husband and I visited the Milwaukee Art Museum and tucked away on the 1st floor were 3 Inness paintings. A very nice collection. For those of us concerned with stray bristles, bits of our wool sweaters or pet hair in the paint - Inness' later paintings are full of that texture. Closeup of Sunset in Georgia , Inness. Autumn by the Sea . George Inness. 1875. Oil on Canvas. Close up of Autumn by the Sea , George Inness. Closeup of Autumn by the Sea , George Inness. Sunrise , also known as Sunset and The Rising of the Moon , 1888. George Inness. Oil on Canvas. Closeup of Sunrise , also known as  Sunset  and  The Rising of the Moon , 1888. George Inness. Oil on Canvas. Closeup of  Sunrise , also known as  Sunset  and  The Rising of the Moon , 1888. George Inness. Oil on Canvas. Closeup of  Sunrise , also known as  Sunset ...

Dryland Wheat on the Plateau . ©2011 Lisa McShane. Oil on Linen. 12" x 24". SOLD. This small piece is the result of my experiments with painting wheat. This is the plateau that my great grandparents settled. It's always struck me as a strange place to settle. Around the time they moved there, Washington was a new state and this was a rocky, lawless area. The land was carved out by massive floods and where they live, water is a long way below the ground. Each farm is huge and is spread out along the tops of plateaus, separated by coulees. There are basalt outcrops in the coulees and rattlesnakes. It's hard to picture arriving in a wagon and thinking, "Yes, this looks like home." But it's the edge of the Palouse and according to my husband (a geologist) the soil is windblown loess (that's a good thing.) Now I think it's stunning.

Study for Wheat 1. ©2011 Lisa McShane. Oil on Linen. 8" x 8". This Friday, 6-8pm, is the opening of Invitational Small Works Exhibit at Roby King Galleries on Bainbridge. If you're in the area I hope you'll stop by! Study for Wheat 1 is one of several small studies I spent months with over the spring, summer and into September. I paint a great many paintings of fields, especially wheat fields, and have struggled with them. Deborah Paris made some suggestions last spring and I diligently went to work trying them out. Study for Wheat 1 was a back and forth process of opaque paint with thin, transparent paint glazed over and wiped off.

Over the past couple of years I've looked at and played with a lot of computer programs for keeping track of artwork. Here are past blog posts on the subject: Art Inventory Systems, here's what I've tried and then this Update on Art Inventory Systems Alyson Stanfield has also written about this riveting subject on her great blog here . I come to these systems with built-in bias. I prefer a FileMaker based system to an Access based system because I think it's a more powerful and smoother software to use. I'd worked for a nonprofit that used Filemaker and it's what I know. I also prefer a system without goofy graphics. I'm an artist. I care how things look. If I open up software every couple of days I would like it to be clean and simple and not ugly. But computers evolve and the next direction is to the cloud. That is a system where software doesn't live on your computer but you access it via the internet. I operate on 3 devices: my iMac in my ...

Spring on Rattlesnake Ridge. Oil on Linen. 22 x 36. I make no apologies: I am painting and repainting Rattlesnake Ridge. Different seasons, different vantage points. This is spring, early morning, very clear air. I was there in May and found a great dead end where I could sit and sketch and take notes. I'd been seeking a place where I could see the river (that's the Yakima River) and some of the eroded basalts with the fields above (wine grapes and fruit trees) and a straight-on view of Rattlesnake.

Portland Ship Yard, Night. ©2011 Lisa McShane. Oil on Linen. 9" x 12". Last month I was in Portland and spent a wonderful evening with my brother-in-law and his family. After dinner we watched the moon set from the Willamette Bluffs overlooking the ship yards. It was a beautiful night.

The Road East. ©2011 Lisa McShane. Oil on Linen. 24" x 24". Mid-August our youngest son left for college in Wisconsin and my husband drove him there so that he could take his bike and his guitar and amps. My husband is a geologist and he maintains a fascinating blog called Reading the Washington Landscape . (Note to artists: you don't want to know how many visitors a geology blog receives relative to one of ours.) Along the way he sent me a photo of the road, the hills and a cloud.  That inspired this painting. So this is the road heading east, to where my children live.

The River. ©2011 Lisa McShane. Oil on Linen. 20" x 30". This is where the John Day River meets the Columbia along the gorge.  Last year I purchased a book of historic photos of the Columbia and I refer to it when I paint the river paintings. The book is "River of Memory, the Everlasting Columbia" by William Layman. The photos are black and white and show the river before the dams.  This would have been rapids. According to Layman, the rocks were removed by the Army Corps starting in the 19th century to allow for easier barge transport. 

" River Bend ", ©2011 Lisa McShane, Oil on Linen, 20" x 30" I've got a show coming up in two weeks so I've been hard at work finishing paintings. This is a bend in the Columbia River and is one of several river paintings that I've been working on in preparation for a larger series. I'm practicing. I've also been experimenting with more texture and have added an impasto medium from Natural Pigments to my palette. The show: September 24th & 25th at Bookwalter Winery for their annual Catch the Crush celebration I'm looking forward to it!

Cornwall Beach. Oil on Linen. 9" x 12". This is very near my house, just a walk through downtown Bellingham on Cornwall Avenue to the waterfront. There's a pile of riprap that makes for a perfect place for people who know their way around to sit and watch the sunset. The clouds lately have been fantastic.

Dryland Rain. ©2011 Lisa McShane. Oil on Linen. 30" x 20". Paintings seem to arrive as a combination of experiences. This one is a good example of that. A friend of mine moved into a new house last year and hung a large photograph in his entry. It's a black and white landscape with a low horizon, a highway and clouds. It's a vertical image and because I love road images, I love to look at it. Last last winter I was driving across eastern Washington with another friend and she asked 'do you ever paint vertical landscapes?' I said rarely and a minute later we were driving towards a virga rain cloud - desert rain where it evaporates before it hits the ground. I thought of my friend's photograph of the road and clouds. Vanessa turned the camera sideways and started snapping vertical pictures. Then later I was working on this painting and visited the Amon Carter Museum in Forth Worth Texas with Deborah Paris , Sara Lubinski and others to see the exhibi...

Skagit River Sunset. ©2011 Lisa McShane. Oil on Linen. 12" x 24". The sun setting over a bend in the Skagit River. This is a painting that I started last September and finished last week. There are many layers and I experimented with reflection, light and composition.

Along the Ridge at Dusk. ©2011 Lisa McShane. Oil on Linen. 24"x36". I finished this painting today at noon, after working on it nearly every day for about 3 months. For a time I was posting daily images of it on Facebook, which you can see here , and I wrote about it on my blog here and here . After awhile I stopped posting the images daily for a few reasons. It seemed that the changes were too subtle to be really interesting and for most, they might be wondering why I was posting the same exact painting every day. And then at one point I needed to make corrections and lighten up and change an area and that makes the painting temporarily seriously ugly. I didn't want to alarm friends who might wonder why I was ruining my painting. While this was in progress I went back to sketch Rattlesnake Mountain and when I was in the studio the next day, quickly added what I needed to make the mid-ground work for me.

Perigee Moon . ©2011 Lisa McShane. Oil on Linen 20" x 12" The day we had the super moon this March it was oddly clear in Bellingham. I picked up another artist, Donna Auer , well before dawn and we drove to Lake Samish to watch the moon set and the sun rise. We chased the moon a bit as we struggled to find the right viewing spot what with trees and houses blocking our view. We stopped at one point on a dead end road and saw the moon high through the branches. Lovely. I've placed it lower but remember well how it looked.

I'd seen a few of Remington's paintings over the years that pretty much knocked my socks off. Yet I'm surprised with each one I see because I think of him - still - as an illustrator. The last few paintings I saw changed that. I now see him in a whole new light. Night. Two weeks ago I visited the Gilcrease museum in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Great paintings there by artists I was unfamiliar with, like William Jacob Hays and his painting Herd of Buffalo on the Bed of the River Missouri . Unfortunately they don't allow photographs and they sell very few reproductions in their gift shop. This one isn't on their website, nor is their fine Remington nocturne online. I've got nothing to show you. But there was a Remington Nocturne and it was amazing. Then the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth which, happily, allows visitors to take photographs of their permanent collection. After all, why the heck wouldn't a museum allow that? So sensible. Here's their Remington wit...

There are some wonderfully fine and kind painters up here in the NW corner of the US. All of us braving the months of drizzle for the long summer days. David Ridgeway is new to the blogging world but definitely not new to painting. I had the opportunity to visit his home and studio on a bright snowy day in December. Click here to see his new blog and a post with a great painting of Orcas Island. John Stinson paints NW Washington and the Palouse (yes! like I do!) but with a somewhat different approach. I love his work. The first time I saw one of his paintings it was of a field near Coupeville Washington. I'd tried (failed) to capture the same scene a few months prior. He'd really nailed it. Here's his blog. And Kat Schneider. Lovely, lovely abstracts. Hilarious sense of humor. Here.

As part of my extensive tour of museums and BBQ joints in the south, I also visited Kansas City. I'm pleased to report that they have a really fine museum: the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Ar t. The museum is free to visit, has a wonderful collection of American art to study and allows you to take photographs. In fact, one of the museum guards had a nice discussion with me about how close I should be from the surface of the painting for my photographs. She approached me and said that she understood what I was doing but perhaps they'd be more comfortable if I was about 2 inches farther back. Can do, very nice. The collection included a very good Inness, a lovely small Homer and a Sargent. There were many others but those were my top favorites. George Inness, Old Farm - Montclair , 1893. Oil on Plywood. This was one of Inness' last paintings as he died in 1894. Note the wonderfully layered textures. George Inness, Old Farm - Montclair , 1893, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Ar...

Thomas Moran,  Cliffs of the Green River, Amon Carter Museum,  Fort Worth Texas First, thank you Amon Carter Museum for allowing people to take photos of the paintings in your permanent collection! Artists learn from studying artists and without the freedom to take a photo to look at later, again and again, it is difficult to study paintings. For me it's important to look closely at the surfaces to see the hand of the artist. For instance, here are three closeups of the Moran painting. With the top photo I'm interested in his trees and the edges of the hill and sky. Beautiful clouds here and nice darks. The warmth and dark values in the foreground are interesting to see. But this closeup is what I'd wanted to really nail: the reflections in the water in the lower left of the painting. Thinly painted; very nice.

Deborah's printing press Etching lesson Deborah's Prints I have wanted to learn how to make prints for about 25 years. I longed to take printmaking in art school but I was a double major in metal sculpture and oil painting and loved my art history and drawing classes so there just wasn't time. I love the line and the inky blacks. Fortunately Deborah has a printing press and taught 5 of us how to etch one afternoon. She gave each of us a small zinc plate, some etching tools and we furiously worked to create small prints. Then we heated the plates, rubbed ink on and rubbed it off and each of us made a print. Mine wasn't good but I absolutely loved the process and can't wait to do it again!

On Friday our workshop group hit the road and went to the exhibit , The Hudson River School, Nature and the American Vision , at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Fort Worth Texas. It was about a 3 hour drive from Deborah Paris' home and studio in Clarksville, Texas. The Hudson River school exhibit was very good and I especially liked the work of William Hazeltine. Because it was a traveling exhibit, we weren't allowed to take photographs. However the museum's permanent collection is terrific and I took photos, including closeups of several key paintings. Here is Martin Johnson Heade, Marshfield Meadows, Massachusetts, ca. 1866-76. And here are the closeups I took because I'm working on a painting with rain: Tomorrow: more paintings

Deborah Paris at her easel, April 2011. One of the very best things about Deborah's workshop is the opportunity to see an artist at work. She uses her own paintings to demonstrate technique and talk through ideas for us. In several years in art school I don't believe I ever saw one of teachers painting. I took one other workshop and again, didn't really see the teacher paint (other than on students' work...and that's just not the same thing.) Because Deborah teaches an approach to painting that's technically challenging - indirect painting - she spends time each day demonstrating for us. She also often simply works in the studio while we're painting in the afternoon. And that's really fun too. So here she is at the easel. Deborah Paris' palette, April 2011 And here is Deborah doing a paint mixing demo on her palette. That's seriously fun to watch and the discussion about transparent, semi-transparent and opaque is interesting.

I just finished an 8 day workshop in Clarksville, Texas with artist Deborah Paris. It was my second Texas workshop with Deborah and in some ways, even better than last year's. Writing up a workshop is a challenge. First, there's simply no time while you're in the thick of things. You paint all day, enjoy your meals with the other artists and then some of us paint again until bedtime. I had good intentions of taking time to write, reflect and take long walks. That didn't happen. I painted a lot. At this workshop, when I had a spare moment I looked through Deborah's collection of art books. She's got a great library. So I'll take this piece by piece and start by setting the stage. Here we are: the 2011 Texas Workshop group with Deborah Paris. The only person missing is Deborah's husband Steve Whalen. He is a remarkable cook, kept us all well fed and - bonus - is fun to hang out with. Left to right: Deborah Paris , Phoebe Chidress, me , Sara Lubinski ...