Lisa McShane

Lisa McShane paints the deep waters, rivers, forests, and land of the Pacific Northwest and the intermountain West. Her great-grandparents on both sides were settlers near the Columbia and Snake Rivers in eastern Washington, and she grew up hearing family stories about how the Columbia used to be. Her father was in the Air Force; her earliest drawings were of the roads and mountains she saw on road trips home to Connell. She began oil painting at twelve, when her mother enrolled her in Saturday lessons at Herr Ludwig's studio near Ramstein Air Base in Germany — and Saturdays are still dedicated to painting today.

McShane works in layers of oil paint, wax, and resin on linen, mounted to wood. Her paintings are large, abstracted, layered, graphic — built around light and the way it falls on land and water. She has worked for decades alongside her painting practice with conservation groups and Tribes to restore the once-great salmon runs to Washington's rivers, and her recent work makes climate change explicit: her two-panel paintings of the Skagit River delta show the land as it is now and as climate models project it will be in sixty years. "This is my home, my world," she has said of one panel. The other: "the world for my grandson and his life."

She has been Artist-in-Residence at Petrified Forest National Park (2015) and at Grand Canyon-Parashant National Monument (2017). Her painting The Sun Sets on the Slope of the Horse Heaven Hills was exhibited in the American Embassy in Yemen; Mountains at Dusk is in the collection of the Washington State Governor's Mansion in Olympia; recent Skagit delta paintings are on display in the Washington State Treasurer's Office. She has had eight solo shows in the past decade. Her studio is on Samish Island, on fifteen acres of forest she shares with heron, bald eagles, owls, and deer, with views of Samish Bay, Padilla Bay, the North Cascades, and the Olympic Mountains.