Lisa McShane Art

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. ...

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.

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...

Wheat Ripens on Top of the World We've had a busy and wonderful 6 day trip careening around eastern and southern Washington State. And poked around Oregon a bit. Delightful. We drove across Snoqualmie Pass to Yakima. Then the next day to Ellensburg, stopped at Ginkgo Petrified Forest, then across the flat land of central Washington to Spokane. From there we drove to Basin City to spend the late afternoon with my extended family. That was restorative: time with cousins, aunts, uncles, sisters and farm views lit up with golden evening light. The next day we drove across the top of the Horse Heaven Hills. This year will be a bumper crop of hard red wheat and at the bottom, the fields were still green. At the top, deep cadmium yellow - that's the photo above. I've painted several images of the Horse Heaven Hills - here , here and here . There are more to come. These hills have caught my imagination. To the north they border and define the Yakima River. This exposure is ...