Lisa McShane Art

Val d'Orcia Storm. Oil on Linen Panel. 24" x 24". This spring I met my daughter in Italy for a couple of weeks. It was stormy and beautiful. I thought it was a perfect time of year to be there and watch the skies, drink wine and eat robust, winter foods. I don't normally paint images of my travels as I like to paint places I know well and that seem to be part of me. But I was already focused on painting storms and this is just one more.

'Summer Field'. ©2012 Lisa McShane. Oil on Linen. 16x20". Some paintings come together quickly and some take a great deal of time, week after week. Then others can sit for months or longer on a shelf in the studio gathering dust, challenging me to figure out their issues. 'Summer Field' is one of the latter challenges. I believe I started this nearly a year ago. And then my vision for it faded. But I've always watched fields go by out the side window of the car. I find them compelling and I wanted to capture that quick glance. A few months ago, rather than start a new painting, I picked this back up and sanded it down, built up new layers, sanded them down. I like the texture and I'm satisfied with the colors and the sky. I finished 4 paintings last weekend, and this is one of my favorites. I just dropped it off for a show called 'In the Field' at the Lucia Douglas Gallery in Bellingham. The show opens June 7th with the reception June 16th,...

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.

Perigee Moon . ©2011 Lisa McShane. Oil on Linen 20" x 12" The day we had the super moon this March it was oddly clear in Bellingham. I picked up another artist, Donna Auer , well before dawn and we drove to Lake Samish to watch the moon set and the sun rise. We chased the moon a bit as we struggled to find the right viewing spot what with trees and houses blocking our view. We stopped at one point on a dead end road and saw the moon high through the branches. Lovely. I've placed it lower but remember well how it looked.

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...

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.

These are the sketches, 2 stages of underpaintings and final image for Trees, posted yesterday. I really like seeing the steps and stages of a painting when other artists share their photos so I've decided to take more of those shots and share them too. You can see that the layers of glazing that went on after the underpainting really softened the edges of everything. You can also see that nothing changed substantially after those first decisions were made. That's the nature of indirect painting: you carry it all through to the end. What that means is that I think through the composition and detail more carefully at the beginning than I would with direct painting. While the subsequent layers of color in the glazes can surprise me towards the end when the painting starts to really 'glow', there cannot be big changes in layout. As a result, I do a great deal more sketching before I begin: no more diving in, loaded paintbrush in hand. Lots and lots of sketches and edi...

Trees. Oil on Linen Panel. 12" x 9". This last couple of weeks I've been finishing paintings I started in January while learning indirect painting but hadn't yet finished. This is one of the first I started and one I hadn't planned to finish. But each day for the past two weeks I've added a layer of glazing to this painting until it began to glow.

Two Trees, Fog. Oil on Lead Primed Linen Panel. 12" x 9". SOLD . Winter shadows and fog. Those are currently my favorite things to paint. Oh, and nocturnes.

Cherry Point, Christmas Day 2. Oil on Canvas. 20" x 16". What can I say about this painting? I love it. It's been through several iterations, and I'll post an earlier version below so you can see the changes. I started it shortly after Christmas along with Cherry Point, Christmas Day 1 (love that too!) and Alder Grove, Cherry Point . The one above was challenging at first. I showed it to Ruthie V and she noticed that I'd placed a band along the back, to convey the top of the trees. Great catch, so I brought the sky down over that visual barrier and softened the trees in the background. I painted the sky again and repainted the trees over the sky, softening all the edges (that's the stage it was at below.) Then Deborah Paris in our Luminous Landscape class suggested I darken the path substantially and I did. That made all the deep shadows lay down and pop. This painting is more saturated in deep color than a jpeg can convey. So saturated that I've been l...

/> Original sketch for Anacortes Gap. I visited the area in December in preparation for the painting. The other sketches looked like they'd work as paintings but didn't. Underpainting for Anacortes Gap. It was very dark and so I sanded it down aggressively and chunks of paint came off. I decided to start a second to experiment with the same glazing, only with different values in the underpainting. (Values are the relative lights and dark.) This is now the one I call Anacortes Gap 1 and it's 14" x 11" on stretched canvas with 3 coats of acrylic gesso. Underpainting for Anacortes Gap 2. As you can see, it's much lighter. This one is painted on a lead primed fine linen panel which posed it's own set of challenges as the painting went on. This is Anacortes Gap 2 after about 3 or 4 layers of glaze. You can see it's darkening quickly despite the light underpainting! This is Anacortes Gap 2 today. Dark and mysterious. Anacortes Gap 1, after several initia...

This is the second glaze of Lake Samish, early morning. I have a lot of history with Lake Samish and think about some of that when I paint it. For 5 years I directed a Girl Scout Day Camp at Lake Samish. That was crazy fun and probably the most challenging and rewarding job I've ever had. I loved every moment of that. And by job, I mean I was a volunteer. Every Thursday night at Day Camp the oldest girls would stay the night in tents. When everything was sort of quiet, I'd walk around the camp to make sure all was well and look at the lights across the lake. Then 9 years ago, when my husband was on the County Council, there were plans in the works to develop the hillside on the west side of Lake Samish with two or three houses per acre. He led the way to change the zoning so that it would always remain forested. I'm very proud of the work he did to right the past wrongs of intensive zoning in our most sensitive rural areas.

Trees in the Fog. Oil on Lead Primed Linen Panel. 12" x 9". Why emphasize the priming of my substrate? Because it's had an extraordinary influence in the direction of this painting. Lead primed portrait linen is somewhat unforgiving: it's slick-smooth and hard. Every touch shows and it's hard to soften the edges. Exactly the challenge I need in my quest to learn a softer touch in my edge work. This is one I shared weeks ago on the blog right here and yes, I've worked on it every single day since then. More transparent glazes, more semi-opaque areas of sky, back and forth between the sky and the branches, back and forth between the lit leaves on the forest floor and then the lovely transparent glazes that darken them too much. I'm not sure why I shared my sketches and underpainting of this painting last month. At the time, I was certain this wouldn't turn out. At all. A warm, deep forest floor, the small rise with the trees, the thicket of forest behin...

Skagit Morning. Oil on Linen Panel. 8" x 10". This is another painting that is part of my exploration into Tonalism. Simple painting, soft and indistinct edges. One of the important qualities about Tonalism is soft edges. This is a style that followed a hard edged period in art and in contrast, the artists used an exceptional softness in their paint application. I've always used hard edges. Early on in my painting I was most influenced by Wayne Thiebaud and I love his built-up edges, often highlighted with bright colors. Cadmium red! Cobalt blue! I was attracted to the emphasis and lack of subtlety. But this past couple of years, when I visited museums what I photographed most were the lovely, interesting edges. The depth of the soft transitions between planes. So I'm thinking about my edges now and experimenting with a softer approach.

These are two paintings I've been working on for 4 weeks. They began the same week in early January as underpaintings for my Luminous Landscape class with Deborah Paris (great class BTW!) The top one is 14" x 11 and is on canvas. The first underpainting was way too dark. So I sanded it down. The bottom on is 12" x 9" and is on Wind River Art's lead primed portrait linen. The underpainting was quite light. I've continued to glaze these each day and now they're nearly identical! Of late the glazing has focused on the right side, on conveying the quality of light filtered through the cedar boughs. One of these will be in the upcoming show: 4 Women, 4 Seasons, at the Blue Horse Gallery. I don't know which one yet. Although neither one is finished yet, I'd love your thoughts on which one is more succesful!

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!

Highway 101, Fog. Oil on Gessobord. 12" x 16". I've started painting several landscapes based on the trip we took up Highway 101 in California this August. The drive was all too quick (we were accompanied by two 17-year old boys) but it was beautiful. We saw dozens of elephant seals (crazy!) and miles of gorgeous coastline. The fog moved in and out during the drive and sometimes we couldn't see far at all. For miles we were behind 4 motorcycles and the passenger on the one in front of us was holding a video camera above her head the entire time, filming the trip. Her stamina was impressive.

101, Fog. Oil on Linen Board. 6 x 8. $110- Last August we spent 3 days driving the roads in California. One day on I-5 from Oakland to LA was a clear, blue day. I spent much of the time watching a fire to the west, near Santa Cruz. From where I sat, in a large rental car, the shifting shape of the smoke rising behind the golden hills, outlined with blue sky, was beautiful to see. We drove back north from LA along 101. The windy road, the fog blowing in and out, the subtle shades of the vegetation - this is what I'll be painting for the next several weeks. Since working on the Plateau in Winter series fog has become one of my favorite things to paint.

Afternoon Valley. Oil on Canvas. 18 x 24. This is in the Road to Asotin series. I sanded this halfway through and then applied glazes so it's a very polished painting with a lot of depth in the dark areas.

Road through the Hills. Oil on Canvas. 16 x 20. I finished this painting yesterday. Or at least I think I did. It's still hanging in the studio so I might find an improvement or two to make. It's from a large and ongoing series called Road to Asotin. Road to Asotin: Last year I worked as the Field Director for Governor Gregoire's re-election campaign in Washington State. It was a remarkable experience: I saw stunning landscapes, worked for one of this country's most exceptional women, and got to know great people both on the campaign and in the communities we visited. We traveled to the most beautiful corners of the state including my favorite area, the Palouse. We spent two days traveling to Asotin County in August and my current series of work is based on that trip.