Lisa McShane Art

for Dan on Valentine's Day West Wind 2 by Mary Oliver You are young. So you know everything. You leap into the boat and begin rowing. But, listen to me. Without fanfare, without embarrassment, without any doubt, I talk directly to your soul. Listen to me. Lift the oars from the water, let your arms rest, and your heart, and your heart's little intelligence, and listen to  me. There is life without love. It is not worth a bent penny, or a scuffed shoe. It is not worth the body of a  dead dog nine days unburied. When you hear, a mile away and still out of sight, the churn of the water as it begins to swirl and roil, fretting around the sharp rocks --- when you feel the mist on your mouth and sense ahead the embattlement, the long falls plunging and steaming---then row, row for your life toward it. Still Waters. ©2010. Lisa McShane.

I've been cleaning out old files and found this. It was tucked away during art school in the late 1980's: Anonymous (Toltec, c. tenth century) The Artist (From the Spanish translation of Toltec Codice de la Real Academia, fol. 315, v. With the help of Elvira Abascal who understood the original Toltec.) The artist: disciple, abundant, multiple, restless. The true artist: capable, practicing, skillful; maintains dialogue with his heart, meets things with his mind. The true artist: draws out all from his heart, works with delight, makes things with calm, with sagacity, works like a true Toltec, composes his objects, works dexterously, invents; arranges materials, adorns them, makes them adjust. The carrion artist: works at random, sneers at the people, makes things opaque, brushes across the surface of the face of things, works without care, defrauds people, is a thief. [ Translated from the Spanish by Denise Levertov ] Toltec : an Indian people who flou...

Meanwhile the World. 9 x 12. Oil on Linen Panel. I've always loved poetry. As a child and a teenager, I wrote a lot of poems. We had books of poetry and I entertained my family by memorizing and reciting back long poems. I recited The Mountain Whippoorwil by Benet in a Forensic Tournament in Germany. In High School I'd go to the city library to read poetry. I copied down what I loved best and at home I'd type them up on onionskin paper and put them in a notebook. I still have my poetry notebook. It's full of wonderful, meaningful and beautiful poetry. In May I went to Texas for a workshop at Deborah Paris' studio . Deborah reads a lot of poetry and read a poem to us. It was beautiful. When I left Texas I went to Colorado to visit my daughter and ran across a volume of Mary Oliver's poetry in a local bookstore. I bought it.  This past few weeks I've been reading Mary Oliver over and over and over again in my studio. I copied out poems and pinned them to th...

High in the Clean Blue Air . 12" x 16". Oil on Linen Panel.  Wild Geese       by Mary Oliver You do not have to be good.  You do not have to walk on your knees  for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.  You only have to let the soft animal of your body  love what it loves.  Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.  Meanwhile the world goes on.  Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain  are moving across the landscapes,  over the prairies and the deep trees,  the mountains and the rivers.  Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,  are heading home again.  Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,  the world offers itself to your imagination,  calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting-- over and over announcing your place  in the family of things.

Peter Bruegel the Elder (1525-69) -  Landscape with the Fall of Icarus  (1558) Musee des Beaux Arts    -- W.H. Auden About suffering they were never wrong, The Old Masters: how well, they understood Its human position; how it takes place While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along; How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting For the miraculous birth, there always must be Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating On a pond at the edge of the wood: They never forgot That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse Scratches its innocent behind on a tree. In Brueghel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry, But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone As it had ...