Lisa McShane Art

Across the Fields. ©2011 Lisa McShane. Oil on Linen. 16" x 20." Just back from a quick trip to eastern Washington where the sun and light were - as they often are - amazing. I drove up to the top of McBee road in the Horse Heaven Hills to see dawn on the face of Rattlesnake Mountain. But it was good to be back in the studio and put the last glaze on the grasses of this painting of Skagit county, looking west late in the afternoon.

Closeup of Rattlesnake and the River with burnt sienna ground. T his winter I read in several sources that Sanford Gifford first stained his surface with burnt sienna.  I first read about this on Philip Koch's great blog  in a post titled Bold Power Hiding in Subtle Colors . And of course the next day an artist friend, James Lourie , forwarded me the link to Philip's post knowing how I'd love it! Loriann Signori wrote about it on her blog here , saying " Sanford Gifford stained his white canvas with burnt sienna, drew in white chalk and then glazed more rapidly. He would paint non-stop from sunrise to sunset when he began the color part of his painting. He had already worked out his color idea in his oil sketches. Gifford kept working and blending his glazed layers while they were wet. " David Dunlop, in a blog post titled Luminous Skies has a great, brief explanation along with images. (BTW: his blog is great, deep with information and his own wo...

In progress - Rattlesnake dusk. This past few weeks I've been trying something out on Facebook: posting an image each day of the progress of a painting. I started with just the sketch and at the end of my day in the studio I pull out my camera and tripod and snap a shot. You can join the crazy fun by clicking here and then 'liking' my page on Facebook. As it turns out, it really doesn't influence my process. I don't paint differently because I take a photo each day. But I don't know that it's really all that interesting for those who follow me on Facebook. The nature of Facebook is that an image pops up randomly in their feed and they may see one every few days but without context unless they click on it. At the end I think I'll take each image and put them together in a quick slideshow. What I'd like is a 'flipbook' or 'time lapse' approach to quickly see the changes take place. If you know what program will work to make th...

Rattlesnake and River. ©2011. Lisa McShane. Oil on Linen. 16" x 36". Now it's finished. Just a little more work on the sky.

A new shipment of mongoose and chungking bristle Rosemary brushes Yesterday I arrived home to find a wonderful little box leaning against my front door: a new shipment of Rosemary brushes. It's been awhile since I've written about brushes, and my Rosemary brushes have clocked several miles of strokes, so I thought I'd narrow down my list of what I like and don't. I think the mongoose and the chungking bristles are amazing. The prices are shockingly low, the quality exceptional. Buy these. At first I liked the ivory line - a synthetic bristle brush - but now they seem to splay when loaded with paint and the splay is not for me. I think these would be good for acrylic painters but for oil, I think natural bristle just performs better. The ebony brushes are good but they do turn into a sort of crazy mop, like the bad perm I had in 1st grade, and no matter what I try I can't seem to persuade them to go back to looking like the brush I ordered. It could be my cl...

Rattlesnake and the River. ©2011. Lisa McShane. Oil on Linen. 16" x 36". I'm sure 99.9% of the artists who blog and who post paintings online wait until the painting is finished before they post the image. I'm not in that camp. Sometimes - and this may be one of those times - I post the image so that I can see how it looks at a distance, in a different format, from a different angle and at a tiny size. Yes, it's wet and I'm still trying to decide whether or not I want to add clouds. Clouds in a landscape are such an integral part of the composition that they will be in my original sketch and then I add them in during the underpainting. But with this painting, I've just been uncertain. No need for feedback, I'll just be thinking about this.

Update on Art Inventory Systems for 2011 2014 Update It seems worthwhile letting you know that about 3 years ago I switched to a cloud-based system - Artwork Archive - and have stuck with that since then. Artwork Archive . You can read my  new write-up about it here . 2011 Update Below Since I wrote the post on Art Inventory Systems a year ago I've changed up my own inventory system and thought I'd report in and let you know how that's going. First I made the full switch to eArtist and it was working great. But then my 2-year old Dell Vostro laptop decided life wasn't worth living and died. So I bought an iMac (which is a fairly major change!) and began the big switch. eArtist I contacted eArtist to find out if I could use the same license for Mac software. I heard back right away that yes, the license key is independent of downloading the software so just download the Mac version. The eArtist switch to the Mac was seamless for the software but less so...

The Road North. © 2011 Lisa McShane. Oil on Linen. 16" x 20". My studio faces west toward the alley in an old Victorian era neighborhood in Bellingham, Washington. I'm about a mile from Bellingham Bay on a slight hill so I can see over the houses behind me. Northwest Washington tends to be cloudy and a day of solid blue is very rare. It tends to be breezy to windy here. When I ready about hurricane force winds elsewhere I think pffft - pansies - can't they take a breeze? That's just the same old, same old winter storm. The enormous benefit of all of that to me is that I can just look up from my easel and out the glass wall of my studio to see clouds. I spend a lot of time looking at those clouds.

Rublev Paints in their box Antica Green Earth and Nicosia Green thinned out Last month I finished a painting of wheat fields in August afternoon sunshine . That sensation of pale gold is hard to capture in paint and I'd spent a few months moving back and forth between glazes and laying opaque ochre mixtures into the glazes. It's easy to make the field too yellow and thus, lacking in depth and visual interest. A couple of weeks ago I was telling Deborah Paris of my difficulties with the wheat fields. She suggested I try several experiments (which I'm doing) and asked if I had Rublev's Yellow Ochre Light. (Why no I did not!) So the next day I had 6 tubes of Rublev paints headed my way. They are lovely and more than that - seriously interesting for an oil painter/art history buff/married to a geologist. They are more fully called: Rublev Colours Artists' Oils , " Oil Paints from Natural Mineral, Organic and Historical Pigments for Fine Artists." Th...

East Fields at Dusk. ©2011 Lisa McShane. Oil on Linen Panel. 12 x 24". The wide open fields of eastern Washington, looking west towards the Cascade Mountains at dusk. This is just north of my family's wheat farm in an area that's simple and stark. The interplay of light, clouds and fields have a subtle beauty.

Blanchard Dusk. ©2011 Lisa McShane. Oil on Canvas. 30" x 40". Looking east across Samish Bay at dusk with the toe of Blanchard Mountain on the right and flooded fields in the foreground. Blanchard Mountain is a special place. It's the only place along the coast where the Cascades reach the sea. From the top of Blanchard Mountain you can see the entire San Juan archipelago to the east and to the west, Mt. Baker and the Twin Sisters.