Lisa McShane Art

Yellow Tulip. Oil on Gessobord. 5" x 7". This is a quick study of a yellow tulip from my garden. I was experimenting with my new and fabulous Rosemary & Co. brushes to see how they'll do with direct painting and heavy paint. They were perfect.

1 White Hellebore. Oil on Linen Panel. 4" x 6". I've been looking at the loveliest hellebore outside my studio for a month now. It's huge, with perhaps a hundred blossoms. This may not be my definitive work on the white hellebore but it's a start. I'll return to this again.

First Hellebore. Oil on Canvas. 7" x 5". The weather has been amazing here in the Pacific Northwest. Yesterday I spent the day with my husband on, over and around Puget Sound. He did his geology work, I sketched trees. We caught the 3:30 ferry from Port Townsend and sat in the sun on the ferry. Really. Sun. The guy next to us saw grey whales spouting but I missed it. Today my pink hellebores opened. Or at least 2 did. Anytime now the white hellebores will be fully open. Great, great weather.

Jude and The Apricots 2. Oil on Gessoboard. 12 x 9. $180. This morning when I went to the studio the still life from yesterday was still on the windowsill. Today the bud behind the larger flower was opening and the big flower fully open. The apricots are fading and a little flatter. It's hot out and they've been sitting in my studio for two days now. I liked them all even better and painted them again.

The Alexandra Rose 3. Oil on Canvas. 10 x 8. The third painting of The Alexandra Rose. Despite a little rain, summer is in full swing here. There are many flowers and the beans and onions are ripe.

The Alexandra Rose 2. Oil on Gessoboard. 5 x 7. This is The Alexandra Rose, a single rose that grows in small and elegant clusters in a very shady area of my garden. The flowers are edged in copper with a yellow center when they open, but quickly fade to a sweet pink. I had a full weekend of painting, which is good because I have to report for Jury Duty this week. I've packed a sketchbook, pencils, my iPhone and a book. I have the Brushes app on my iPhone and have seen interesting work by artists recently using that app. If they turn out, I'll post them.

Clematis durandii. Oil on Gessoboard. 7 x 5. My garden is in the Relay for Life garden tour here in Bellingham in a couple of weeks. As a result, I'm more focused than usual on flowers. My studio is lined with these little flower portraits right now. This is a shrubby Clematis. What that really means is it's a short vine that needs to be next to an actual shrub in order to do more than sprawl horizontally on the ground. This one is next to the Rugosa rose I painted last week so they grow as a pair. This clematis has remarkable navy blue flowers. Few flowers are this deep blue color. With the tan to gold stamens and the large flowers, it's something right now. Some plant pairings are magical, some functional and this is the latter. The prickles of the Rugosa are exactly right for a reluctant vine to scramble up. It's in a little juice glass, one my sister Ellen gave me. The glass arrived with red roosters on it. This one is my husband's favorite glass for red wine so...

Pink Rugosa. Oil on Canvas. 10 x 8. This is a Ritausma Rose, a Rugosa. It's a fantastic, sweetly scented and freely flowering rose. One of my husband's favorites. My roses are not grafted, they grow on their own roots, and so with a rose like Ritausma, it has cool thick brown stalks shooting up from the ground. I've had it for 3 years and in another two, it will be a wonderful thicket. The thicket makes the following happy: my husband, the birds, the neighbors and all the people who walk by on the sidewalk.

Roses and Milk Jar. Oil on Canvas. 14 x 11. This is a small painting of a David Austin English rose, Jude the Obscure, with the lovely Duchesse de Nemours peony. What great flowers! With summer in full swing, I've been painting flowers this week. The milk jar is a bonus of where I live. There's a great corner store a block away that carries milk in glass jars from a local organic dairy. I always have one or two on the kitchen counter waiting to be traded in for a full container.

Single White Peony. Oil on Canvas. 10 x 8. This is another beautiful peony from my garden. It's not nearly as fragrant as Duchesse de Nemours, and it produced fewer flowers this year, but I love single flowers. Those are flowers that have but 5 petals. When a rose has 5 petals we often call it a 'wild rose' but they're simply bred to be single. The much more double, and much more fragrant Duchesse is still putting out the flowers and I started a new painting today. That'll be the last peony painting for the year.