Lisa McShane Art

Winter Lake. ©2012 Lisa McShane. Oil on Linen. 20" x 16". It's been a dark winter here in the Northwest - we are all feeling the darkness and understanding gray in an entirely new way. These past few months I've been drawn to painting that dark, gray landscape, puzzling through the mystery of this area. A highlight for me these past few months has been a composition class I took with Deborah Paris . It was challenging - all of her classes are - but this one challenged me in a new way. Deborah had us draw the landscape onsite, then take the elements from those drawings and compose them into something new. No photographic reference, just drawings, notes and memory as reference material. This painting is a result of that.

Still Water. ©2010 Lisa McShane. Oil on Linen Panel. 9x12. I have great news: the Roby/King Galleries on Bainbridge will be representing my work in that area. I'm thrilled to be working with Wes and Andrea and pleased to join their gallery. If you're in Seattle or Bainbridge, please stop by the gallery in downtown Bainbridge and see my paintings! Among them is Still Water. This is a favorite of mine and one that previously was not available for sale.

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.

Canoe Among the Alders. 16 x 12. Oil on Linen Panel. As you may have noticed, I've spent a lot of time these past few months at my small nearby lake - Lake Padden - watching the canoes and kayaks. Last week it was over 60 degrees and there were a LOT of people and boats at 6 pm. This is in the winter; the alders are bare. I love the mossy one on the left.

Evening Canoe. 9 x 12. Oil on Linen Panel. SOLD I varnished 5 paintings yesterday and you know what that means: I finished 5 paintings yesterday! Woot! You know what else that means: I have room in my studio to start new paintings! Woot! Woot! So, enough woots. Currently the paintings in progress are 22 x 30 or larger and in my tiny studio, they fall on me from their various precarious perches several times a day. No matter. I'm excited about the ones I'm working on.

Evening at Padden. Oil on Linen Panel. 9 x 12. This is Lake Padden, where I often walk my dog. It's about 2.7 miles around the lake so a perfect size. I started this painting while I was in Texas and is one of several that captures what it is I love about this lake.

Yesterday was a big day in my studio: not only did I return from my workshop w/ Deborah Paris, but my paintings, brushes, paintings and frames arrived home from their travels too! Most notably, my canoe painting - above - arrived home framed in a gorgeous hand made frame from Mountains Edge Frames! Check them out here . This one is perfect for my painting. It's a dark, strong and simple presentation. I love it - thank you Steve! And my apologies for my blog post title: this is what we've said for decades when we return from a trip. I can't help myself.

Canoe 2. Oil on Linen. 30" x 22". After weeks of glazing, Canoe 2 is now complete. As you may be able to tell in a glance looking at this jpeg, the final photo isn't complete. Something this large and this glazed is really, really hard to photograph. I'll try again tomorrow morning. This is of a canoe on Lake Padden at dusk in the late winter. When the painting began the trees are bare. I was just at Lake Padden. It was 70 degrees and everything was leafed out. I miss the winter light already. As I wrote about here , here and here , Canoe 2 was inspired by a number of canoe paintings by Peter Doig and by my evening walks at Lake Padden.

Work in Progress: Canoe Back and back I go to Lake Padden at dusk trying to capture the quality of the light. Darker and darker with the painting, yet with a light sky. Happier and happier is Sam, my dog, from all the trips to Lake Padden.

Canoe in the Alders: Underpainting, part 2 This is the third in my series of canoes at Lake Padden. Lately everytime I'm there so are the canoes. My husband tells me it's all the same guy, named Wallace or something but that's just silly. These canoes do move fast and I love the wake they leave behind. This painting is 16" x 12" and is a linen panel (350DP from Wind River Arts - their heaviest thread with an alkyd priming. I like it so far.) The paint is Vasari Shale and what you see here is the second, more detailed underpainting. The first one was a light turp wash to roughly establish the layout on the panel. Next I'll let this dry and then begin adding the transparent color over the underpainting, probably adding in a little more detail with shale after I see a couple layers of color. Right now I'm excited about the old tree on the left: it will have a chartreuse moss on the right side. Cool!

Canoe 2 - in progress and on the easel on the left and a closeup of the texture on the right. I've been back out at Lake Padden in the afternoon and towards dusk lately to capture the irregular and somewhat obscure pattern of alders in winter. The texture is notable to me because it's linen, hand primed with an oil ground. As  much as I disliked using an oil ground, I love painting on it so it's a surface that's here to stay. Because I primed it, the surface is a bit like a smooth plaster: slightly irregular but polished and lovely.

Canoe with glazing This is the smaller version of my two Canoe paintings, in progress. After the underpainting was completed and dry, I began to apply layers of resin mixed with transparent oil paints to start adding the color. Since this is a painting of a canoe on Lake Padden in the early evening, there will be many more layers before it achieves the dark quality I'm looking for.

Padden Dawn 1. Oil on Linen Panel. 9" x 12". Lake Padden at dawn, with the light coming up on the left. And a duck. This is the lake I know better than any other lake. We've had our wonderful dog Sam for 10 years now and this is where we like to walk. I was hesitant to paint it at first because a local artist who I admire, Donna Auer , does the most wonderful large pastels of Lake Padden. But I finally dove in. Figuratively, never literally. Although Sam occasionally chases sticks into the water. But the painting: to me these lakes that surround me (Padden, Samish, Whatcom) are exceptional examples of northern lakes. The light, the surface and the trees and foothills that surround them, speak of cold, northern, glacial lakes.

Canoe 1, underpainting. Oil on Linen Panel. 9" x 12". Canoe 2 Underpainting. Oil on Linen. 30" x 22". These are the underpaintings for 2 new paintings of a canoe at Lake Padden. I'm entranced by these 2 paintings this week. Last week I was walking with a friend at Lake Padden right around dusk. We had our dogs with us. It was cool and cloudy and there was a lone red canoe on the otherwise still lake. It reminded me of wonderful paintings by Peter Doig of a canoe on a lake and I couldn't wait to get home and start a painting. So I started two.

Work in Progress: Lake Padden Dawn This is Lake Padden on a still winter day, early in the morning. On my way home from Lake Samish I like to swing by Lake Padden just to see how the reflections are and always hoping for interesting fog patterns to study. Even this early there are runners and people with dogs. Go hardy people! (Brrrr.) In addition to thinking constantly about the sky (what color is it now? And how about now?) I also think about water reflections. The morning I'm working on here, the reflections in the water were not as dark as the trees and low hills I saw. I think that's because with the light rising behind the hills, my eyes simply didn't read the value differences in the hills the way I was able to see the variation in the reflection. Not sure. This painting has just started. This is just the first layer of color over an underpainting of shale and dark orange.

Padden Reflections 3. Oil on Linen Panel. 6" x 8". This is the last of my 3 on Lake Padden. This is near where I park my car to walk the dog around the lake. I was there Saturday morning at 7 to watch the dawn sky over Lake Padden and observe the colors and reflections. There was just a trace of fog and a few hardy runners and dog walkers. What a great place.

Padden Reflections 2. Oil on Linen Panel. 8" x 6". This is the second in my 3 part series of Lake Padden, exploring the same image but with different temperatures in the underpaintings. Part 1 was Indathrone Blue underpainting, this one is both Transparent Yellow Earth and Transparent Orange Earth. I found the blue underpainting hard to adjust to as I've always used warm tones beneath my paintings. But I was inspired by one of my new landscape books, Mitchell Albala's Landscape Painting , to try a blue undertone. It is winter in the far north. I also favor a wide horizontal in my paintings and enjoyed the vertical of this. It enabled the tree to shine a little better.

Padden Reflections 1. Oil on Linen Panel. 6" x 8". Last night I finished watching the PBS mini-series 'Emma'. Fabulous! So this is my version of a mini-series. There are 3. In this mini-series I'm experimenting with different temperatures of underpainting. No doubt, you'll see little difference! This also began as an underpainting for a thinly glazed painting. But...since it's nearly all water and sky, who can tell? Just the hills in the background are glazed. Everything else is directly painted. Of note, this is number 29 for the year. I'm a fan of numbers, deliverables, accountability, all that, so I'll keep you posted throughout the year. 29! Yay!

Study for Lake Padden Path. Oil on Linen Board. 5" x 7". This is my favorite place to walk my dog. We park near here and head through the tunnel of alder trees to round the lake. The grass to the left is always green but ankle deep in water! This is a wet area.

Study for Lake Padden in the Fall. Oil on Linen Board. 5" x 7". This is one of several studies I worked on today for Lake Padden, a lovely recreational area near here. It's an area I like to walk with my dog, or with friends, or both. I've not painted in the area before because a friend does such lovely pastels. When I see Lake Padden I've always thought of her. But here's a painting.