Lisa McShane Art

Towards Bow. ©2013 Lisa McShane. Oil on Canvas. 30"x30". Winter in the northwest. This is the view to the west in Skagit. I don't know why, but the sky under the clouds is often yellow (when we can catch a glimpse.)

Toward the Islands. ©2013 Lisa McShane. Oil on Linen. 22x30" There's a beach not far from my house that's extremely contaminated. It's fenced off so that people don't walk their dogs but there's a small area where you can sit on logs and look out. I like to walk down there and look at the water. Towards sunset a small and varied army of watchers gathers to see what the sky and water will do. This is a painting I started nearly a year ago and struggled to finish. Most recently, the water didn't convey what I wanted. Yesterday I rode a ferry out to a nearby island and watched the water carefully, telling a friend what I was seeing. This morning I was able to complete the painting.

"Spring in the Foothills". ©2012 Lisa McShane. Oil on Linen. 16" x 20" I've been painting outside when the weather is clear lately. In particular, an area to the east called the South Fork Valley. Usually I paint the view to the east because I'm keenly interested in capturing the mountains in changing light. But sometimes when I need shade there are overhanging trees with a view to the south: Anderson Mountain. Lately the grass has been crazy green with patches of mustard flowers. Until last week it's been a little cool and the snow patches were hanging on.

Lake at Night. ©2012 Lisa McShane. Oil on Linen. 9" x 12". There's a cold and lovely mountain lake near me that I drive by often. There is very little public access to the shore so the glimpses I see are at 60 mph on Interstate 5. But this is what I see when I pass at night: a few lights reflected in the deep blue water.

Mountains at Dusk. ©2012 Lisa McShane. Oil on Linen Panel. 15"x27". I've been sketching and painting in a beautiful valley just to the east of me for the past few months. This is the view. A friend has a property where I can draw and paint for hours. No-one stops by to ask what I'm doing or to tell me the great news that their niece paints watercolors. (Not that there's anything wrong with that!) I love the quiet. There are ponds, rugged hills, a river and views of the North Cascades. Unlike much of the country, our winter has been cold and wet. The mountains have had a lot of snow and with the rain, we haven't seen them much. But every once in awhile they come into view, deep with snow.

Blanchard in the Clouds. ©2011 Lisa McShane. Oil on Linen Panel. 15" x 15". As the new year comes to a close the drizzle coats my skylights and I'm focused on finishing paintings of winter in the Northwest. This is what I often see to the west when I head home - the sun slipping under the clouds just beyond Blanchard Mountain, with the oyster gray clouds piling up overhead. Blanchard Mountain was an area I worked to protect for a number of years and it holds great meaning to me.

Skagit River Sunset. ©2011 Lisa McShane. Oil on Linen. 12" x 24". The sun setting over a bend in the Skagit River. This is a painting that I started last September and finished last week. There are many layers and I experimented with reflection, light and composition.

Mt. Baker from Margaret's. ©2010 Lisa McShane. Oil on Linen Panel. 9" x 12". Mt. Baker from Margaret's will be in Art + All That Jazz , a benefit for Whatcom Museum. It's one night only: Friday, November 12 from 6-9 pm. If you're in Bellingham, please come! There will be amazing art for purchase. This is a plein air painting - different from my studio work. This was painted in Skagit Valley looking at Mt. Baker to the northeast on a sunny afternoon. When you watch Mt. Baker in the light of the Skagit Valley, it changes color about every 5 minutes.

Canoe 1. Oil on Linen Panel. 9 x 12 . This was the first canoe painting I started, months ago. And here's the great thing about posting works on progress: I can look back in amazement at how long a painting can take to complete! Here's the first blog post about Canoe 1 from March. Yes, March! This small painting took 2 1/2 months to paint. Except for my trip to Texas, I worked on this every day. Canoe 1 was a study for a larger version, Canoe 2. You can see the finished version here . I love both. Both are crazy hard to photograph as they are deeply glazed.

Skagit After Tryon. Oil on Linen Panel. 9 x 12. Early this spring I was driving a group from the High School Debate Team to a debate in Snohomish County. Driving along at 65 in the giant, rickety high school van I saw an incredible scene to the west that looked exactly like a Dwight Tryon painting. There was a row of bare trees, gray clouds and a band of cold yellow light below the trees. Given the circumstances, I could only glance but this is what I remember. I'd been studying the tonalists at that time, which was why the scene hit me with such force. A day or two later I stumbled on this wonderful blog post by Loriann Signori where she discussed the Tryon paintings she'd just seen in D.C.! Shortly after that I started this painting. You can see an early version of it on my blog here . It's taken quite a while to paint this - adding things, taking things out.

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.

Samish Alders, Frozen Lake. Oil on Canvas. 16 x 20. This is part of the Northern Lakes series. I've been keenly interested in the view you catch quickly, through a scrim of trees. Like this. Especially before dawn when it's very hard to see what it is you're seeing.

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.

Underpainting for After Tryon: Skagit Dike. 9" x 12". Oil on Linen Panel. Dwight Tryon. Dawn, 1893, Collection of the Smithsonian In March I drove south on I-5 through the Skagit Flats south of Mt. Vernon and was struck at a gorgeous scene to the southeast: yellow sky, gray clouds and a row of trees. It looked like a Dwight Tryon painting. I'd been studying Tonalism and reading the extraordinary book, Like Breath on Glass , about Whistler and the Tonalists. While the book has but one Tryon painting reproduced, I looked others up online. Then a day or two later Lorian Signori had several posts about Tryon on her blog here and here and also here. Last Friday the weather was lovely and my husband and I went to Skagit so I could look again at the row of trees. They're lined up on the Skagit River dike, which is why it's just one row with so much light coming through them. Gorgeous. Then to Edison for Fish and Chips and beer. Tasty.

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.

House in the Fog. Oil on Linen. 20" x 16". So! Yesterday I asked whether or not I should craft better titles for my paintings and decided to title this one, House in the Fog , rather than Alger Fog 2 . (Why yes, there's an Alger Fog 1 , see it here .) Yes, titles! This is a painting I began in January but struggled with it a bit. So I hung it on the studio wall and started the smaller Alger Fog 1 . This is clearly an image I wanted to tackle and work through. I'm happy with Alger Fog 1 and it sold quickly at the '4 Women, 4 Seasons' show at the Blue Horse Gallery. My struggle with this one was with the surface. I was using one of Utrecht's acrylic primed stretched linens and it has a couple of issues: it has some bristles stuck in the primer and it is very, very, very absorbent. I was so annoyed with it that I wrote about it here . But you know, once there's a certain number of layers of glaze and scumbling, that all falls by the wayside. Now that i...

Samish Dawn 3. Oil on Canvas. 18" x 28". Isn't this lovely? It makes me happy to look at this one. Early dawn spreading over Lake Samish. Full of hope and promise. I sent this one out in my weekly email last Thursday and a dear friend pointed out that with Samish Dawn 1, 2 and now 3, perhaps I could come up with more creative titles! Point taken! I'd love to hear from you: what are your thoughts on titles? Do titles help engage the viewer or do they intrude into your interpretation?

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.