Sometimes my muse may be as simple as the
grays, blacks and whites of a sycamore tree’s bark or the high altitude desert
plants on my daily hikes in the Sangre de Cristo mountains. Other times, inspiration
is fired by the painfully beautiful setting sun over the Ganges River on a
sojourn there. I find emotional solace in poets from Neruda to Auden and their
words find their way into my work as well.
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| Bittersweet Pilgrimage, encaustic on panel, 30” x 30” |
My journey has been long and well traveled. I
was raised in Washington, D.C. where I was obsessed with the National Gallery
of Art. My parents were history buffs, so they encouraged my love affair with
the museums of our capital city. As a child, I knew my direction but not how to
navigate my way. I was also deeply impacted by the unrest that simmered
throughout Washington during those years. I was swept into protesting the
Vietnam War (and consequently tear gassed during a march) and I was present on
the Mall with my father during Martin Luther King’s speech. The local riots
terrified me and I became politically motivated for the first time in my
teenage years. I loved the heartbeat of the city.
I was set to stay in the Washington area after
high school graduation when my first real and life altering tragedy struck. My
oldest brother committed suicide two days after my graduation. It was an event
that would color my world in ways I did not imagine at the time. It has
filtered into my work, my dreams, my way of seeing the world as well as the way
I was to nurture and raise my own three children. It also made me change my
course. My father owned land in Indiana so I quickly decided that summer that
Indiana University would be a place where I could escape the pain on my parents
faces and the strange quiet that had descended upon us. I moved to Bloomington.
It was in Bloomington that I earned a fine
arts degree with a focus on textiles. I found that creating massive silkscreens
and woven hangings soothed my grief and gave me another outlet for protest. My
early pieces were twisted Navajo patterns or natural objects cocooned in silk
threads. I explored photography and photo silkscreens and spent summers in
Washington photographing the buildings and iconic places I loved.
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| Hejira, encaustic on panel, 50” x 40” |
After graduation and a young marriage, I briefly
lived in London and Houston. I taught art at the secondary level in
Indianapolis and then drew my artistic visions into the way I raised three
children. I taught them to make paper and outdoor sculptural installations as
well as to freely paint, draw, dye wools, plant gardens and act and stage
Summer Solstice festivities on our country property. I was a hippie mom and
that has never changed. Everything has always been organic and “of-the-earth”
in my life. I even bought fleece from local sheep, which I cleaned and spun and
dyed to make the sweaters my children wore for years.
In 2010, the stars aligned in a different way
for me. I had a desperate need to return to myself and find another road to
travel. My marriage ended, leaving deep scars that threatened to drown me on
every level. There were days I couldn’t get up the mornings. I grasped at hopes
and opportunities and found myself visiting a friend in Santa Fe where I ended
up in an encaustic workshop. I was thinking I should return to school and perhaps
pursue an MFA when that one weekend transformed me. I was intoxicated with
beeswax and the organic nature of it and its smell and the translucency of
layers of wax like Arabian Nights’ veils. I’ve always traveled extensively and
there was something about the surface of wax that reminded of ancient places of
the world. It felt sacred and earthy and I wanted to use it to once again
express pain and process and hope and to mark my passage.
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Springdrive, encaustic on panel, 60” x 24”
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Because of its organic nature, wax can behave
differently on any given day, due to pigments, humidity or the level of the
heat source used for fusing. There is lots of scraping and smoothing and
fussing with each layer of wax but eventually I begin to apply color and
design. I often add my own handmade papers or snippets I’ve gathered from
travels around the world. I start with deciding whether the work will be “warm
or cool” - in other words, reds and oranges and yellows or blues and greens and
violets. I find It varies with the seasons. The wax tends to find its own way
but eventually we meet in the middle and something connects with a line from a
poem or from my own emotional well. I might see a shape that reminds me of
something and I follow it. Mistakes happen but I often leave them because I am marked
with my own mistakes and wounds and all of that has validity. Through my art I
can trace my travels, my turning points and my moments of illumination.
One of my small paintings, “Acid Rose”,
emerged due to the landscape drawings of a man I loved once. All I had of him
were his landscape designs on papers so I tore them to bits until one day I
gathered them back to me and embedded them in wax. This little work became a
statement on the subterranean layers of the earth - or the heart.
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| Varanasi, encaustic and mixed media on panel, 18” x 18” |
“Varanasi” tells of my experience on the banks
of the Ganges in India. It is a place that enters your soul. Varanasi is the holiest
of cities for Hindus. It is desperately beautiful and desperately awful all at
the same time. Saris in other worldly colors of saffron and acid yellows are
hung out of windows to dry, and bodies are cremated while feral dogs wait for
the remains. People chant, rejoice, worship, bathe and leave their loved ones
in the river. I floated my little cup with marigolds and candles out into the river’s
current as a way of honoring my own dead. A bit of paper I bought there hangs
like a shroud from the top of the painting and a boat being oared through the
water at sunset made its way into the piece.
Three years ago, I packed up my studio, my
dog, two cats and a lifetime of relics and moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico, where
I found a mountain I can call my own as well as a bright, artistic community.
Summers of my past were spent in the south of France with my children and I
have discovered that the light, the altitude, the lavender, the grapes, the stone
walls and colors of adobe architecture mimic those young giddy days in Provence.
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| We Dance on the Swirls of Cloud Tops, Venetian plaster, oil and encaustic on panel, 24” x 24 |
I will continue this exploration of mine and
will continue to tell my story because only I can do that. Here in northern New
Mexico, the sky is my water.
Neruda: “This was my
destiny and in it was the voyage of my longing.”
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| Acid Rose, encaustic and mixed media on panel, 14” x 14” |
This
is Week 22 of 52 Artists in 52 Weeks. Thank you for reading and sharing Lisa’s story today. To
connect with her and see more of her work, please visit the following links:
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