Lisa McShane Art

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...

Hills 4. Oil on Canvas. 12 x 20. This is a recent painting from the Road to Asotin series. I remain interested in the sunset light at harvest in the Palouse and the patterns in the wheat fields. School starts next week for my son and once things are settled I'm planning a trip to Walla Walla and Dayton to paint and another trip to the Similkameen Valley in north central Washington to paint. It will be a busy fall!

Hills at Dusk. Oil on Canvas. 9 x 12. $180. I finished this painting today. I'd started it several months ago. It has layers and layers of glazes which made it hard to photograph.

Columbia County Hayfield. Oil on Canvas. 11 x 14. I believe I've finished my series, Road to Asotin. Not sure. But I think so. Columbia County Hayfield is in that series, middle of the series. The last one in the series was Big Hills, Palouse . You can see the entire series on my Art Website . Or, the entire series that made it out of my studio. There were several more that found themselves in the 'not good enough' stack in the hallway. I don't abandon paintings quickly. I've found that some simply take a lot more time and layers of paint than others. But the bad stack, well, they're just bad. I'm working on 7 paintings right now: 3 are in the series, Plateau in Winter , 3 are small paintings from my garden, 1 is a large painting of the Similkameen Valley. By Saturday afternoon all were wet and I had to stop painting.

Clouds and Fields. Oil on Canvas. 30 x 40. My website went live today! Please visit it at www.lisamcshane.com . Those of you with websites know that this meant a lot of work to get it together and up but it was a labor of love. I actually like things like databases and websites. I decided to go with an online art template company, called Foliolink. It's been a good experience. They have helpful people ready and willing to chat with me on the phone. I like the work of the other artists I see there. The templates were great and - very important to me - iPhone compatible. Back to the painting. This is Clouds and Fields from the Road to Asotin series. There's a lot of movement.

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.

Big Hills, Palouse. 30 x 36. Oil on Canvas. I finished this painting Saturday. It's from my Road to Asotin series and is one of my favorites from the series. I've been working on this for more than two months. And by working on it, I mean it's been hanging in the studio while I worked on many other paintings, and occasionally looked at it long and hard to figure out what more to do. Saturday I added more definition to the hills, decided I liked it loose, lush and fairly thin, and then photographed it today. I think it captures the early morning light in a narrow valley of the Palouse at harvest.

Three Trees in the Palouse. Oil on Canvas. 18 x 24. This is a study for a larger painting and its one I think worked well. This is from an area in eastern Washington, near Uniontown. Its a terrific little town with a bakery and a saloon - cool and refreshing on a hot August day - that serves homemade potato chips. Delicious. I'm on the east coast visiting my daughter and we have reservations tomorrow morning to visit the Barnes Foundation, just outside Philadelphia. I can't wait!

Hills at Sunset. Oil on Canvas. 15 x 30 These are the tops of the hills in the Palouse, near Waitsburg, as the sun is setting. I spent the morning getting my new database loaded and up and running, full of my painting information. After a lot of research I went with http://www.workingartist.com/ . Its an Access based program and that works better on my laptop than the more common Filemaker based art databases. So far its great and will enable me to be organized and track my work.

Hills 1. Oil on Canvas. 16 x 30. This is the landscape near Dayton in the Palouse. I love the eroded hills. The foreground is a field of grass in late August - dry and golden. Those are the colors that define the west for me: the browns and purples of the hills and the many tones of yellow. This painting is one of my favorites of the Road to Asotin series.

Field of Wheat - 14 x 28 - Oil on Canvas This is a painting I finished about a month ago, in the Road to Asotin series. The Palouse at wheat harvest has an amazing light quality. I'm happy with how this one turned out.

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.