Positively

I can count on my left hand the number of times I can remember her throwing a fit. Her mother will likely disagree. But I find this child one of the most positive people I've ever known...granted, I've only known her a little over two years, her being two years old after all.

Charlotte © Lissa Banks 2018

She's a bit of an old soul in that body. I suspect she is reincarnated from someone who in some way was denied the life they wanted and has been born into this one determined to relish each and every moment...the good and the bad.

While visiting her the other day we sat on the floor of the sunroom, the rug strewn with crayons and markers; boxes and paper marked with abstract figures (her specialty) embellished with a constellation of stickers. She proudly showed me another of her masterpieces, this done with pink pen on the white painted furniture. I tried my best to give her a disapproving scowl but I was powerless against her twinkle and her smile.

One day she may become a surly teenager or a busy woman, too busy for her old Grandma. But at least I'll have this memory of her, radiant, victorious over chastisement. Positively perfect.

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Tulip Field Fantasy

Before all things went to hell in a hand basket there was this moment when I managed to get one of the boys to stand still long enough for a quick snapshot before he ran off with his brother to wreck destruction on a good number of tulips. I'm certain, given the number of children at the tulip picking field, the farmers factor this into their overhead but their mother wasn't too happy with their behavior.  Being a grandmother I get to shine these kinds of things on somewhat, though I helped with the roundup and parceled out my share of hairy eyeballs to the miscreants.

Tulip Field Fantasy © Lissa Banks 2018

William loves all things nature. He will caress a newfound earthworm friend, gorges on kale straight from my vegetable garden and giggles with delight at kittens and puppies, newborn lambs and strutting chickens. And of course, there was that night we were all eating lobster that created for him his first existential crisis. So although he hardly stood still long enough to have noticed a single monarch that day, I imagined him surrounded by them in that moment of innocence...before the downfall.

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  For more about my work follow me on Facebook or visit my website Lissa Banks Paintings to learn how to purchase an original. You can purchase prints for sale at  FineArtAmerica.com.

What I Wanted

Looking back over the past few years worth of work it makes total sense why I was feeling a bit burned out. Flowers followed by fruit, followed by flowers, flowers and more flowers and then some fruit. I tend to be a creature of habit so I've learned to mix things up now and then...take a new way home, cook some fiddlehead ferns for dinner, move across the country. You know, easy stuff.

All He Wants © Lissa Banks 2018

We were sitting in his living room enjoying a cocktail. The light was just right and he was framed by those huge windows and beautiful woodwork. I snapped the shot then quipped that it would make a good painting, because, it would! At this point I had zero interest in attempting portraiture again but he started nudging me to do it. I resisted and resisted until I didn't.

I thought I was going to transition to landscape for a while but I'd accumulated a whole slew of photos of people, mostly of the young variety, what being a grandmother armed with an iPhone and all. But still, I felt a bit tentative since it'd been a while since I took on someone's likeness. I find children's faces somewhat daunting so I decided to plunge ahead with an adult face, this one of the noodge in chief.

It went well from the start and I found myself in a state of greater freedom to experiment. In this case I kept the figure fairly tight but loosed up on the background elements. It was exhilarating and inspiring.

Maybe it's because the face did go so smoothly and the likeness really was quite good that I am now emboldened to move on to more people and maybe more people and maybe some people and flowers or people in landscape or people and flowers in landscape or just people in flowers. Voila! I have dug myself out of my rut and I'm excited about a new project. Some more people.

I invite you to visit my website where you can sign up to receive now and again emails that will keep you up to date with where I’m showing, when I post these musings, and when I am offering special sales and promotions! My site is secure and I PROMISE never to sell your information.

  For more about my work follow me on Facebook or visit my website Lissa Banks Paintings to learn how to purchase an original. You can purchase prints for sale at  FineArtAmerica.com.

Unsheltered

I must be no more than three in the portrait. I was exempt from posing, the artist having to work from a photograph to imagine my likeness...not to mention personality. As a result, I appear to be a docile creature, more like the doll I'm holding than the stick straight hair, skinned knee ruffian that I actually was. My sisters look more like themselves, at least to me...none of them ever really approved so I ended up with the painting after my eldest sister, its most recent custodian, died last fall.

Banks Girls by Doris Porter 1955

The painting was always a bit of a sore spot, but not so sore as to have been cast out of our households. Now that it's landed in mine I'm thinking about it a little differently.

It's not a common thing these days, or way back in the mid 1950s for that matter, to have one's children's portrait painted but my parents did. They had neighbors, a married couple, both artists and professors at University of Michigan in Ann Arbor back in the day. (It's hard for this child of the 60s to imagine her decidedly conservative parents cavorting with "artsy" professorial types but cavort they must have.) These artists' influence flavored my parents' world, and subsequently my own, from then on.

Carlos Lopez - Untitled

Although my most recent painting is a far cry from the dark, symbolic, expressionist paintings or the lively ink sketches that Carlos painted, I feel a kindred link to him. And I thank him for that.

Unsheltered © Lissa Banks 2018

All four of us sisters were encouraged to stretch our creative imaginations in our own ways. And though it has taken me until my golden years to share my work with you and others, I know that my parents' openness to the importance of art and creativity paved my way. I'm just a late bloomer I suppose.

My parents most certainly created a safe place for us to nurture our abilities. They provided the paints and brushes, the fabric and thread, the clay and tiles and grout and ink and paper with which we grew, sheltered and encouraged. Their own imaginations were fertile ground to our own, and for that I am most grateful. So I'm looking at that old painting with new eyes. It represents a nascent seed that they planted in me, that most definitely not placid pageboy hairdo'd girl in the front.



I invite you to visit my website where you can now sign up to receive very infrequent emails that will keep you up to date with where I’m showing, when I post these musings, and when I am offering special sales and promotions! My site is secure and I PROMISE never to sell your information.

  For more about my work follow me on Facebook or visit my website Lissa Banks Paintings to learn how to purchase an original. You can purchase prints for sale at  FineArtAmerica.com.