Lisa McShane has been painting since she was twelve years old, when she spent Saturdays at Herr Ludwig’s studio near Ramstein Air Base in Germany. Her family has deep roots in the wheat country of southeastern Washington — a cousin still grows winter wheat on the plateau her great-grandparents settled — and that landscape, its saturated light and eroded hills, is one of the recurring subjects of her work. She double-majored in sculpture and painting at Sonoma State University. After raising children, she worked for Conservation Northwest and on Governor Christine Gregoire’s 2008 re-election campaign, traveling the state. In eastern Washington one evening, watching the sun drop below the horizon, she knew it was time to paint again. Her studio is now on Samish Island, on fifteen acres of forest overlooking Padilla Bay.
In Wild Viridian Sea, the composition pivots on a dramatic diagonal thrust: ochre and burnt sienna dunes surge leftward while a turquoise-to-pewter gradient ocean spreads horizontally, its surface carved with white striations that read as both water's movement and the artist's deliberate brushwork. Black volcanic peaks anchor the middle distance, their flat planes contrasting sharply with the gestural energy of the foreground sand, while pale blue sky and cloud banks dissolve toward transparency at the canvas's top. McShane's strategy of treating the beach as sculptural mass rather than mere foreground flattens traditional atmospheric perspective, subordinating the distant mountains and making the viewer complicit in the landscape's geological violence rather than positioned as safe observer. She paints large, landscapes in layered oil, wax, and resin over linen. The process is slow and physical — burnt sienna foundation, rough lines drawn from field photographs, then layer upon layer of glazed oil that builds depth and light from within the surface. Her paintings are abstracted, graphic, and focused on light and its effect on water and land. They do not paint an untouched landscape. Wildfire smoke, a road, the reflection of refinery lights, contrails — the marks of human presence are present in the work. Her paintings of the Skagit River delta document what the shoreline will look like when her two-year-old grandson turns sixty-four, given current climate models. These are not comfort paintings.
She was the Artist in Residence at Petrified Forest National Park in 2015 and at Grand Canyon-Parashant National Monument in 2017. Her painting The Sun Sets on the Slope of the Horse Heaven Hills was exhibited at the US Embassy in Yemen through the Art in Embassies program. Mountains at Dusk is in the permanent collection of the Washington State Governor’s Mansion in Olympia. Her Skagit delta sea level rise paintings hang in the Washington State Treasurer’s Office. She has had eight solo exhibitions in the past decade and was a 2024 Artist Trust Grant for Artist Projects recipient. Her work has been exhibited at the Seattle Art Fair, the Museum of Northwest Art, the Whatcom Museum, and the Bainbridge Island Museum of Art.
The art that I love best moves my soul and I aim for that deep beauty in my paintings. I love the place I live and the people in my world and so I work again and again to capture what I see and experience. I want people to see this achingly beautiful world that I see.
