Lisa McShane Art

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...

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.

Five Mile Road to the Blues . ©2010 Lisa McShane. Oil on Linen. 24" x 24".  This is a painting that I started during the studio tour simply so that I could show people an underpainting. It moved much more quickly than most paintings, possibly because I'd been drawing this composition for a couple of months in thumbnails, not quite settling on the finished size.

Road, 3 Trees in the Palouse. Oil on Canvas. 30" x 40". This is one of my top fav paintings that I'm hanging in Walla Walla at Syzygy Wines today. I love this painting! It's been hanging in my office for the past year and looking at it just makes me happy. Why? Well, it's got a road, so there's that. If you've seen my work, you know there's something about roads... And not just any road but a black, smooth and perfect road. (Mars Black.) I love the composition with a sliver of blue at the top, the simple forms and abstracted fields. The three trees at the highway intersection with all the wonderful symbolism that they bring to mind. The colors. These are the things that I enjoy about this painting. And yes, it's for sale :). Syzygy Wines - it will be there from May through July. Stop by! And - bonus - I just got word that the jury accepted my application to the Whatcom Artists Studio Tour. This is the first two weekends of October. I'm exc...

Winter Highway, Chuckanuts. Oil on Linen. 18" x 24". This is the interstate just south of Bellingham as it cuts through the Chuckanut range. The Chuckanuts are the only place along the coast where the Cascade mountains reach down to touch the sea. This small range cuts off Whatcom County from Washington state to the south. To the east we have the North Cascades, to the west, the Pacific Ocean and on our border to the north is British Columbia. We're a little isolated. And that's part of what makes this a special place to live. I've always loved this drive through the mountains because it's lovely, remote, nearly always shrouded in fog and a clear demarcation that I'm almost home.