Lisa McShane paintings at Smith & Vallee Gallery

Light is the main element in my paintings. I use layers of oil paint and resin, usually over linen, to create deeply luminous paintings of light and the way it falls on land and water. I want my work to breathe and to convey the beauty of our world, though I don’t paint an untouched landscape. I paint a world that includes the impact we have on our lands.

In the west our world is increasingly altered by wildfire smoke and I work to capture that: the strange filter that a blanket of smoke casts on the land that changes the way we see color, bonfires near dry trees, strangely vivid suns and moons, and smoke pouring off a distant forest. Fire moves fast. It’s changing the west in late summer and I’m painting those impacts.

My work is increasingly abstracted. I find I have less to say about specific places, and more to convey about the embrace of light on landscapes, whether I’m looking down at a reflection on a river or at a wide horizon line. I rarely paint onsite; I want distance from the experience so that I can engage my memory and my mind. My images often start with a photo, then are abstracted through rough sketches, then drawings, and finally, the painting.