Lisa McShane Art

The Milwaukee Art Museum has a really interesting contemporary exhibit and then European art on their main floor. We went up to the second floor where there was more interesting (and some ordinary) modern art and folk art. My son checked out the basement and reported that there was nothing to see there. Since I hadn't seen any 19th century American art in the museum I asked him if there was anything that I would like downstairs. "Maybe..." In addition to the Inness there was this by Frederic Church. I really like the composition and color of this one. A Passing Shower . Frederic Edwin Church. 1860. Oil on canvas. But one of my favorite pieces in the museum was on the main floor. I went back 3 times to look again: Madonna and Child . Nardo di Cione. ca. 1350. Tempera and gold leaf on panel. Gorgeous saturated colors, lovely skin, all in remarkable condition. It takes my breath away.

Sunset in Georgia. George Inness. 1890. Oil on canvas board. Thanksgiving weekend my husband and I visited the Milwaukee Art Museum and tucked away on the 1st floor were 3 Inness paintings. A very nice collection. For those of us concerned with stray bristles, bits of our wool sweaters or pet hair in the paint - Inness' later paintings are full of that texture. Closeup of Sunset in Georgia , Inness. Autumn by the Sea . George Inness. 1875. Oil on Canvas. Close up of Autumn by the Sea , George Inness. Closeup of Autumn by the Sea , George Inness. Sunrise , also known as Sunset and The Rising of the Moon , 1888. George Inness. Oil on Canvas. Closeup of Sunrise , also known as  Sunset  and  The Rising of the Moon , 1888. George Inness. Oil on Canvas. Closeup of  Sunrise , also known as  Sunset  and  The Rising of the Moon , 1888. George Inness. Oil on Canvas. Closeup of  Sunrise , also known as  Sunset ...

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...

I'd seen a few of Remington's paintings over the years that pretty much knocked my socks off. Yet I'm surprised with each one I see because I think of him - still - as an illustrator. The last few paintings I saw changed that. I now see him in a whole new light. Night. Two weeks ago I visited the Gilcrease museum in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Great paintings there by artists I was unfamiliar with, like William Jacob Hays and his painting Herd of Buffalo on the Bed of the River Missouri . Unfortunately they don't allow photographs and they sell very few reproductions in their gift shop. This one isn't on their website, nor is their fine Remington nocturne online. I've got nothing to show you. But there was a Remington Nocturne and it was amazing. Then the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth which, happily, allows visitors to take photographs of their permanent collection. After all, why the heck wouldn't a museum allow that? So sensible. Here's their Remington wit...

As part of my extensive tour of museums and BBQ joints in the south, I also visited Kansas City. I'm pleased to report that they have a really fine museum: the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Ar t. The museum is free to visit, has a wonderful collection of American art to study and allows you to take photographs. In fact, one of the museum guards had a nice discussion with me about how close I should be from the surface of the painting for my photographs. She approached me and said that she understood what I was doing but perhaps they'd be more comfortable if I was about 2 inches farther back. Can do, very nice. The collection included a very good Inness, a lovely small Homer and a Sargent. There were many others but those were my top favorites. George Inness, Old Farm - Montclair , 1893. Oil on Plywood. This was one of Inness' last paintings as he died in 1894. Note the wonderfully layered textures. George Inness, Old Farm - Montclair , 1893, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Ar...

Thomas Moran,  Cliffs of the Green River, Amon Carter Museum,  Fort Worth Texas First, thank you Amon Carter Museum for allowing people to take photos of the paintings in your permanent collection! Artists learn from studying artists and without the freedom to take a photo to look at later, again and again, it is difficult to study paintings. For me it's important to look closely at the surfaces to see the hand of the artist. For instance, here are three closeups of the Moran painting. With the top photo I'm interested in his trees and the edges of the hill and sky. Beautiful clouds here and nice darks. The warmth and dark values in the foreground are interesting to see. But this closeup is what I'd wanted to really nail: the reflections in the water in the lower left of the painting. Thinly painted; very nice.

On Friday our workshop group hit the road and went to the exhibit , The Hudson River School, Nature and the American Vision , at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Fort Worth Texas. It was about a 3 hour drive from Deborah Paris' home and studio in Clarksville, Texas. The Hudson River school exhibit was very good and I especially liked the work of William Hazeltine. Because it was a traveling exhibit, we weren't allowed to take photographs. However the museum's permanent collection is terrific and I took photos, including closeups of several key paintings. Here is Martin Johnson Heade, Marshfield Meadows, Massachusetts, ca. 1866-76. And here are the closeups I took because I'm working on a painting with rain: Tomorrow: more paintings

Thomas Cole. Study for Catskill Creek. Oil on Wood. 1844/45. National Gallery of Art. Avalon Fund. There's a wonderful permanent installation in the east wing at the National Gallery of Art in DC, Small French paintings. But there are also a few gems by American painters such as Church and Cole. This one is really special.

Whistler. Nocturne in Blue and Gold: Valparaiso. 1867/74.  Freer Gallery. When you live on the west coast, far from the world's great museums, you end up learning a lot about art from books. For instance, Whistler. While I'd probably seen paintings by him in museums in years past I'd only become truly interested in his work in the past two years.  Last week I had the opportunity to take a trip to Washington DC and spend several days in the museums. The first one we went to was the Freer Gallery to see the Whistlers. In person, his nocturnes were not what I expected them to be. They were more layered, more painterly on the surface than I'd read. So below are closeups shots of the above painting. 

Pieter Bruegal the Elder. The Harvesters. 1565. Oil on Wood. 46.5 x 63.25. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. In 1996 my husband and I spent several weeks in the Czech Republic and Poland and on the way back to the Frankfurt Airport, detoured through Vienna. We spent several intensely happy hours in the Kunsthistorisches Museum*, including a long stint in a room with Bruegals. We sat and looked at Hunters in the Snow for the longest time. It's a deeply moving painting. It's also one of six. I've seen five. *OK yes, one of those hours was spent in the cafe eating a delicious layered torte mit schlag. And coffee.

Jacob Lawrence, the Migration Series. "The factory owners had to find new workers to replace those who were marching off to war." At the Phillips Collection, Washington D.C. I've always loved the abstraction and color of Jacob Lawrence's art but didn't know about the powerful migration series until I ran into the odd numbered panels at the Phillips Collection. The series consists of 60 panels painted in 1941. The odd numbers are displayed at the Phillips, the even numbers are owned by the MOMA. The images and story are powerful and I was inspired by his process of conception and planning. He planned the paintings as a series in advance to tell the story, his wife prepared the surfaces and Lawrence painted them in a series, working on several at once. He tells the entire story of the great migration: life in the south, lynchings, the difficulty of moving, the circumstances people found in the north. Here's the website for the series at the Phillips: http://w...

My daughter and husband at MOMA A few days ago a journalist and professor listed her 5 favorite books of 2009 on Facebook. Fantastic idea. I jotted them down for my reading list and immediately began thinking about my 5 favorite paintings of 2009. This was a good year for art for me. I returned to painting full time, established and kept a fairly disciplined studio habit, and painted a number of paintings. I put together my website, this blog, an email and mail list, had a show and sold paintings. All good. I visited museums and saw great art. One of my painting professors (yes, the one who told me I had to paint 100 paintings) told me once that you have to see great art to make great art. She regularly flew to DC just to go to museums. That's inspiring! In February I went to New York and visited the Met (3 times!), the Cloisters, MOMA, the Guggenheim and the Brooklyn Museum of Art. In June I visited my daughter near DC and went to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Barnes Founda...

Study for After Pisarro: Yakima River, Prosser. Oil on Canvasboard. 8 x 10. $150- This is a small study for a somewhat larger painting. There's a Pissarro painting in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York that I love. I noticed it for the first time last February and it stopped me in my tracks. Wow! It's 'Jalais Hill, Pontoise (La Cote du Jalais a Pontoise)' from 1867. The size is 34 x 45. For decades I've loved the view of the Yakima River driving west from Kennewick. This last time I drove by I was struck by how similar it was to the Pissarro painting. You can see the Pissarro, plus a closeup of the luscious brushwork, just below my painting. When I'm at a museum I take lots of photos: a bigger one, one of the name/title, and if I love the painterly quality, I then take closeups of choice areas. My daughter laughs at me but hey - it's great to look at this later and oddly, art books just don't have these extreme zoom images of texture.

Landscape with a Bare Tree and a Plowman. Leon Bonvin. 1864. Brown ink, watercolor and gum arabic on paper. The Getty Center has a special exhibit right now of French Landscapes. Among them was this remarkable gem. It's the painting they use on the exhibition posters and book cover. Their description is wonderful and at the end it says that Leon Bonvin committed suicide at age 31 after an art dealer deemed his works "too dark, not gay enough." I apologize for the off-kilter photo. I didn't want to disturb the person parked in front of the painting but I'm not sure why, my husband would have stepped aside for a moment for me!

Matisse, Girl with Green Eyes, 1908, at the San Francisco Museum of Art We're back from a 9 day trip to California where we visited family and looked at art. This is a painting I've always loved and is so familiar. It's the cover of my 1985 edition of Modern Art by Hunter and Jacobus. I'd hoped to see paintings by Wayne Thiebaud at the San Francisco MOMA but alas, there was just one thing by Thiebaud and it wasn't a painting.

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Figure, 1886-1887; Oil on Canvas, 28 x 19 Paul Gauguin, M. LouLou, Oil on Canvas, 21 x 18 Vincent van Gogh, The Postman, Joseph-Etienne Roulin, 1889, Oil on Canvas, 26 x 21 Henri Rousseau, Bouquet of Flowers with China Astors and Tokyos, Oil on Canvas, 21 x 18 Two weeks ago my daughter and I had a reservation at The Barnes Foundation, just outside Philadephia. I'd heard this was a remarkable and little known collection. It was fantastic. The building was built to house the collection, there's a large mural by Matisse painted on site, and each room was designed to be a masterpiece. By that I mean that the arrangement of paintings, furniture and objects in each room was carefully thought through. It's not possible to describe the quantity of masterpieces. They don't allow photos, you won't find much online, I bought cards and scanned a few for my blog. Look again at the paintings above. The Toulouse-Lautrec is unlike his poster art. The Rous...

Just back from a quick trip to Philadelphia and Washington DC to visit my daughter and see museums. We saw amazing things. I'll post my favorite image from each museum. Or I'll try - it's hard to choose.