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.



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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.

I Do(odle) Now

Sillium © Lissa Banks 2018

I can’t really help it. I need to do something with my hands. So when I’m in a meeting or relaxing in front of the TV and there happens to be paper and a pen or pencil in the near vicinity I inevitably will start drawing. Nothing in particular, though I’m prone to suns and moons and lips.

Circus © Lissa Banks 2018

This past December I decided to start putting this nervous habit to good use. Initially using just pencil, I started concocting crazy images filled with disparate patterns and aimed for nothing really, just a bunch of stuff on a page filling in the spaces of random outlines. The results were quite interesting.

Self Contained © Lissa Banks 2018

Some took on anthropomorphic meanings. Some looked playful, some ominous. Soon I added color and a new line of expression for me was born.

Jelly Garden © Lissa Banks 2018

I’ve haven’t worked in any kind of abstract form for many, many years but I’m finding this a welcome counterpoint to my exacting realism. What fun it is to draw snakelike forms emerging out of and through holes in the universe. And I can indulge my instinct to grab for the brightest green and the most saturated turquoise! It’s fun and freeing.

Nautilus © Lissa Banks 2018

I’ve taken a leap of faith and included them in a submission to a local art center’s members’ exhibition this winter. When I dropped them off one of the director’s remarked. “I didn’t know you did these!”

I replied,” I didn’t either!” And now I do.

NEW!  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.

Jan Theodora

My sister Jan died a little over a month ago.

She was, as all of us are, a complicated human being. In her obituary her son captured the best and the worst of her life when he wrote "Wonderfully eloquent in writing and conversation, Jan expressed herself beautifully and was known for her sharp wit and fabulous laugh. After a severe stroke tragically impaired her ability to communicate over her final 12 years, Jan’s physical limitations never diminished her fierce approach to life."

Jan Theodora © Lissa Banks 2017

That brilliant mind became closed off to us when her stroke left her with aphasia, an impairment of language, affecting the production or comprehension of speech and the ability to read or write. She could get out a few words, sometimes a surprising sentence  or two but then the sands swallowed up her following thoughts, leaving her silenced.

 When I was a little girl she made me the most exquisite paper dolls. I must have been about five, so she would have been about 15 or 16. They were drawn in the style of the most elegant newspaper advertisements of the day and the dresses were all ballgowns mimicking the fabulous gowns worn by Deborah Kerr in The King and I. I was thrilled and played with them until they were pulp.

The dresses she drew shimmer like satin in my memory. With a keen sense of design she went on to become an accomplished seamstress, a tailor really, whose "handmade" coats and frocks rivaled those bought in stores. Never inclined to do anything halfway, her cooking was legend, her home perfection, her dinner parties always memorable. And she did it all because excellence was of the utmost importance to her.  Woe to the unwarned butcher trying to sell her an inferior cut of meat. I was there once to witness her wrath, as many others did.

So when she recovered as far as she could from the damage done to her, the thought of her, of all people, unable to communicate except in spurts and with gestures, her bright eyes or that disapproving scowl, we all understood how much she had really lost.

She left us with wonderful memories of who she was to us all. To me, a second mother I always said. She was the epitome of style and pride with a large dose of humor and sass. I honor her by naming my most recent painting after her.



  For more about my work follow me on Facebook or visit my website Lissa Banks Paintings to learn how to purchase an original, a print or to commission a painting...or find me on Pinterest. Or you can find  prints for sale at FineArtAmerica.com.

Grace

As anyone who has seen my paintings or read this blog knows, it appears that I have something of an obsession with tulips. They are at once elegant, simple, playful, serious, honest and mysterious. Their colors are infinite and their curves both seductive and innocent.

Mirroring cultural biases I tend to select pristine subjects, their frills plump and their brightly colored arches robust and compelling. This time I selected a slightly different subject.

Slow Fade Lissa Banks 2017

There were age spots on this beauty. In a few days the petals would thin and crinkle becoming almost translucent, curling in on themselves before falling to the mantle and ushered into the dustbin.

Maybe it's a response to what I see in the mirror most mornings but I am increasingly reluctant to replace these flowers as they fade. There was a time when I could feel a man's eyes upon me as I entered a room. I'm not sure exactly when it happened but unless I'm walking into a talk about Social Security filing strategies it just isn't the same these days.

I have more compassion for these blossoms which become more and more difficult to call blossoms. What should we call them then? I don't know. I do know that they are still worthy of our admiration. They are still beautiful. They are unique and sometimes tenacious refusing to give up their stem. I love them all the more.



  For more about my work follow me on Facebook or visit my website Lissa Banks Paintings to learn how to purchase an original, a print or to commission a painting...or find me on Pinterest. Or you can find this and other this and other prints for sale at FineArtAmerica.com.

A Tulip By Any Other Name...

I've embarked on a journey. An experiment to see if I will ever tire of painting tulips, sort of. I just might because despite having spent now more than 30 hours facing this lady's backside I find that I'm at a loss as to what to name her. I really don't like the convention that some artists use of simply naming them nothing but I'm coming up empty. Help!

Unnamed © 2017 Lissa Banks

It all started innocently late spring of last year. My daughter-in-law and I took the grandkids to a tulip farm in Rhode Island. Our excitement and awe of the row upon row of tulips gradually succumbed to frustration as the 5 and 3-year-old ran up and down the aisles, tromped blossoms, decapitating quite a few. Realizing the excursion might be over before it began, I took as many photos as I could and grabbed as many samples of my favorites as possible before we all piled back into the car for an angry mommy return trip.

At home I found myself with a rather rag-tag looking bouquet so decided to attempt to shoot a series of portraits of each individual. There might be as many as nine in all in the end hence my flip remark about getting sick of painting them. Yesterday I thought that might be true, until I started sketches for my next tulip portrait!

So, my dear readers, I wasn't kidding. I need your help naming this painting. What does it evoke for you? Let me know in the comment section or drop me an email or visit my Facebook page. I'm desperate!

  For more about my work follow me on Facebook or visit my website Lissa Banks Paintings to learn how to purchase an original, a print or to commission a painting...or find me on Pinterest. Or you can find this and other this and other prints for sale at FineArtAmerica.com.

All Mixed Up

When last I wrote I was in the throes of an artist's block. Yes, that damn petal was driving me to blog. And in the end the blog turned out to be about letting go of expectations.

I'm not sure how I did it, but I nailed the hurdle (you'll tell me if I didn't) and finally finished the tetraptych or quadriptych, which according to Wikipedia are interchangeably used for a four-panel piece such as this. I vacillate between the two depending on which word I can remember to spell at the moment...but I digress.

Family ©  Lissa Banks

Many years ago I moved from east to west to live close to my parents after a marriage, a divorce, numerous jobs, cats, dogs, and three children away. I was there to say goodbye to my father and to meet my mother as a whole human being for the first time in my life. She turned out to be an amalgam of strength and fear, hilarity and timidity, love and bitterness. And she had the softest hands I've ever been graced to have held. She was a difficult woman to be sure: insecure, needy and demanding but loving and devoted. She blesses and tortures me still. Even last night she came to me in a nightmare of sorts!

My first post about this four-in-one painting was how they had come to represent my three sisters and me. Each unique and yet cut from the same cloth. I had expected that's how I'd end up thinking about them in the end. But as usual, I didn't. Not exactly, that is. Expectations dashed once again.

In the end I couldn't put them back into place, I preferred to see them all mixed up. They shine in this way, I think. It causes me, at least, to look at them in a different way.

So maybe they do tell the tale of my sisters and me after all. Maybe I'm looking at us all in new ways now as we are all now solidly in the autumn of our lives... in the same way I had the privilege of looking at my mother in the years before she died. She's in there among the petals, you know, especially the difficult ones, the ones I needed to perfect, most likely just for her.



  For more about my work follow me on Facebook or visit my website Lissa Banks Paintings to learn how to purchase an original, a print or to commission a painting...or find me on Pinterest. Or you can find this and other this and other prints for sale at FineArtAmerica.com.

Blocked

The other night someone asked me if I was ever plagued by the painter's version of writer's block. Oh yeah, I said. Definitely. As a matter of fact I was in the throes of it right now.

The offending flower.

I'd been blissfully moving right along with the fourth panel of a polytriptych that included, of course, tulips. I got this down, I thought when I started. But here I found myself slogging through the next to the last blossom. What was it about that damn flower that was challenging my patience? After a few days I gave up and painted it over to start again. The second try has shown improvement. It's not done by a long shot but I'm not walking away in disgust. At least at this point I can see the light at the end of the tunnel...I think.

However, the conversation with my friend wasn't so easily rectified. I'm sure that it's hard for non-creative types to imagine the process. And quite frankly, I'm also sure that each artist has their own way of doing things. It's one reason why there is such a variety in style and expression. There are lots of books that give folks the one, two three of painting. There are YouTube videos galore. But he said to me, "why don't you just look at something instead of just making it up." I do, I said. I have my sketch, I have a photo reference and my computer set up as well so I can isolate an area and do color checks. But even with all of that I find myself trying to paint what I think something looks like instead of what it really looks like.

My setup.

When we're in kindergarten we paint all our houses with a pitched roof and one door. No windows. Mom or Dad may or may not have arms and usually someone has inordinately long legs. No torso. I find myself doing it now, rounding edges instead of letting the edges subtly ungulate like they do in nature. Letting go of ones preconceived notions of the material world helps me move closer to it.

My friend and I talked past each other for a while before deciding to move on to other topics. I just couldn't explain to him that yes, I was looking. What he didn't understand was that looking and seeing are different things.

I've put down my brushes for the day. Hopefully I'll return tomorrow with a renewed vision. And hopefully, I'll let go of what I think things should be and accept them for what they are.



  For more about my work follow me on Facebook or visit my website Lissa Banks Paintings to learn how to purchase an original, a print or to commission a painting...or find me on Pinterest. Or you can find this and other this and other prints for sale at FineArtAmerica.com.