Lisa McShane Art

Road from Jump Off Joe. ©2014, Lisa McShane. Oil on Linen. 18" x 36" I'm delivering a commissioned painting today. It's of a road through wheat fields on a ridge in Eastern Washington. It's funny to me to be painting this road - this is where a large group of us went sledding in high school. I think we were supposed to be in class but there was snow. This is also where my husband used to run with his friends in high school, high above Kennewick with great views in every direction. He's got a great blog on geology here . Artists - you don't even want to know how many readers he has (yes, people love geology!) Click here for information on hiking in the area. The post I like to describes the ridge as "one of only 18 peaks total in Washington state to be isolated from a taller mountain by a radius of 25 miles of more." It's not that it's tall, it's just on its own out there.

Fall on Red Mountain. ©2014, Oil on Canvas. 22" x 44" Red and Rattlesnake Mountains are in the Yakima River valley of eastern Washington and they interest me in all seasons. The valley seems to capture and hold light and over the years, painting in the area, I've found some great vantage points.

Desert Dusk. ©2014 Lisa McShane. Oil on Linen. 6"x12" This is one of a small series of desert nocturnes. These are images that I have seen countless times on long drives and road trips in the west: a silhouette of hills, vibrant sky, the lights of something that slips quickly by. I've always been interested in those glimpses of other lives, especially the quick images you see at dusk. Dusk is a time people transition from work to home, turn on lights and settle in. To me these quick glimpses seem like a view into another universe.

Horse Heaven Hills Evening. ©2014 Lisa McShane. Oil on Linen. 20" x 30" We visited McBee Road atop the Horse Heaven Hills twice in one day last Fall, when the light was long and saturated. This is the view looking towards the Columbia River.

Selah Canyon 1. ©2013 Lisa McShane. Oil on Linen. 16x20". This is one of my favorite places in eastern Washington. It's a deeply carved canyon with a small, mostly dry creek at the bottom. Selah Creek. It originates in the Yakima Firing Range and heads west to join the Yakima River. Eventually those waters flow to the Columbia and the Pacific Ocean.

Study for Railroad Cars. Graphite on paper. 2013. For more than a decade I worked in environmental policy and politics. I haven't mixed that work into my paintings. No reason, it's just that I've painted the landscapes that I love and that's not the direction I've gone. However, that's changing. This summer the Whatcom Museum is hosting an exhibit called Nature in the Balance: Artists Interpreting Climate Change.   I'll be submitting one painting and I've given it a lot of thought. For a landscape painter the changes we see - including strange and epic storms - are worth thinking about and capturing. Peabody Coal and SSA Marine want to build North America's largest coal export terminal in my county, at an aquatic reserve. They intend to turn a high bluff above the Pacific - beautiful land that is a burial site for the Lummi Nation - into an 80-acre coal dump site. I oppose the project for many reasons but it's been on my mind. A lot. ...

Palouse Road. ©2012 Lisa McShane. Oil on Linen. 36" x 50". I always have a painting of a road in progress in my studio. Now that this one is done, I'll be starting another one soon. This is the Palouse, an area of rolling hills in southeastern Washington. My cousin's wheat farm in Connell is on the very edge of the Palouse; the rolling hills are at their most distinct just north of Walla Walla. The soils are very productive for wheat and wine grapes and the patterns those crops create on the landscape add to the feeling that the entire world is rolling.

Valley in Winter. ©2012. Lisa McShane. 18" x 22". Oil on Linen. When I drive east in the winter across the Yakima Valley the sun sets early on frozen fields. It's not warm out but the sky is often glorious to the west.

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.

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.

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!

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...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.