Lisa McShane Art

Portland Ship Yard, Night. ©2011 Lisa McShane. Oil on Linen. 9" x 12". Last month I was in Portland and spent a wonderful evening with my brother-in-law and his family. After dinner we watched the moon set from the Willamette Bluffs overlooking the ship yards. It was a beautiful night.

The Road East. ©2011 Lisa McShane. Oil on Linen. 24" x 24". Mid-August our youngest son left for college in Wisconsin and my husband drove him there so that he could take his bike and his guitar and amps. My husband is a geologist and he maintains a fascinating blog called Reading the Washington Landscape . (Note to artists: you don't want to know how many visitors a geology blog receives relative to one of ours.) Along the way he sent me a photo of the road, the hills and a cloud.  That inspired this painting. So this is the road heading east, to where my children live.

The River. ©2011 Lisa McShane. Oil on Linen. 20" x 30". This is where the John Day River meets the Columbia along the gorge.  Last year I purchased a book of historic photos of the Columbia and I refer to it when I paint the river paintings. The book is "River of Memory, the Everlasting Columbia" by William Layman. The photos are black and white and show the river before the dams.  This would have been rapids. According to Layman, the rocks were removed by the Army Corps starting in the 19th century to allow for easier barge transport. 

" River Bend ", ©2011 Lisa McShane, Oil on Linen, 20" x 30" I've got a show coming up in two weeks so I've been hard at work finishing paintings. This is a bend in the Columbia River and is one of several river paintings that I've been working on in preparation for a larger series. I'm practicing. I've also been experimenting with more texture and have added an impasto medium from Natural Pigments to my palette. The show: September 24th & 25th at Bookwalter Winery for their annual Catch the Crush celebration I'm looking forward to it!

Cornwall Beach. Oil on Linen. 9" x 12". This is very near my house, just a walk through downtown Bellingham on Cornwall Avenue to the waterfront. There's a pile of riprap that makes for a perfect place for people who know their way around to sit and watch the sunset. The clouds lately have been fantastic.

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...

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.