Lisa McShane Art

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.

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.

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.

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.

Samish Dawn 2. Oil on Linen Panel. 8" x 10". I'm really enjoying painting the lake dawns. Partly because they're soft and lovely, with colors that are fun to layer. The trees and reflections are a delight and I've been focusing on getting the edges just so. Click here to see an earlier version of this same painting.

Blaine Nocturne 1. Oil on Linen Panel. 6" x 8". $110. Blaine Nocturne 2. Oil on #359 Linen Panel. 6" x 8". $110. Great art show at Loomis Hall in Blaine on Friday night! The building was completely cool - really the nicest building in Whatcom County these days - and the view from the roof breathtaking. Nocturnes were the province of Whistler. He did them first and it's not possible to take up a nocturne painting without thinking about him out on the Thames in a rowboat. He was an oil painter and preferred an absorbent surface for painting so that the paint soaked in - no brush strokes visible - and only the weave of the cloth showed, 'like breath on glass.' Yesterday I worked on a nocturne of the view from the roof of Loomis Hall and it turned into two paintings. Note: the following will be keenly interesting only to oil painters. So, here's the deal: I've been using these great panels from Windriverarts in Texas. Nice people, lovely linen pan...

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.

View of the 3rd floor gallery. My paintings will go on the wall on the right, you can see Anacortes Gap 2 on the floor ready to hang. Shirley Ericksen's fabulous Raven sculpture is visible. Steve Satushek's cool paintings on metal on the left. More on his website here . Loomis Hall's group exhibit, 'Olympic Small and Large' part 2 is opening tonight at 6:00. For hours and directions, click on the gallery here . Blaine's newspaper, the Northern Light, has a great article on this. My apologies for the mediocre photos. Apparently if you don't recharge your Nikon batteries every once in a while you're stuck with the iPhone.

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.

Work in Progress: Samish Dawn 2 Work in Progress: Samish Dawn 1 I've spent a lot of time lately studying the sky. Early dawn I like to go to Lake Samish and watch the pink spread across the sky from the left and thinking what colors of blue and yellow I need to mix to create the upper portion of the sky and the blue reflections in the lake. I sketch, I take notes, I take photos but mostly, I'm training my memory to retain the details of the visual information. On the way back I swing by Lake Padden and it's always much brighter there, since it's a good 10 minutes later. Whistler painted wonderful nocturnes and landscapes and he made just rough sketches and notes. He spent a great deal of time, according to his colleagues, training himself to remember visual information: composition, color, the details. I've been working on better observation and on training my visual memory on these visits to Lake Samish.

Alger Fog. Oil on Linen Panel. 9" x 12". SOLD . Still love the fog. This time I approached the painting as if it was fog. I painted the landscape and then glazed over a number of times with transparent gray fog. Denser fog over the hill, less fog over the wetlands.

Early Dawn, Lake Samish. Oil on Canvas. 16" x 20". SOLD . When you head south from Bellingham you drive through the Chuckanut range and nestled in the mountains is this spectacular lake. It's always beautiful but I love it best in the early dawn. For an earlier post with an earlier iteration of the painting, just one glaze on it, click here . I've been going to see Lake Samish at dawn and have several more paintings in progress. Dawn was a little easier to catch a month ago!