Two-fer

It's been a crazy month or so. Rushing around to get myself off for a much anticipated two-week plus vacation left me leaning on my son to pick up and deliver some artwork from and to exhibitions (thank you sweetie). Suffering from a terrible case of jet lag on the return trip I managed to drag myself to a reception at Hopkinton Center for the Arts' Arts in Bloom show, one of my favorites.

Still in something of a brain fog I arrived late only barely registering that my two entries hung near the front door, one of which (Redemption) had a compact yet evocative arrangement in front of it. After four years of participating in the show, I knew that my work had been acknowledged but since I won first place the year before, I assumed lightening simply couldn't strike twice. I headed to the bar for a glass of wine.

Redemption © Lissa Banks 2017

Since I'd arrived late I moseyed around the place to see if I knew anyone or any of the artists whose work hung on the walls. There were beautiful pieces, one of which, had a fabulous arrangement in front of it. After noting the use of tree bark, I turned and complimented the artist on her win. She had no idea the arrangement meant she'd won a prize so was thrilled. I moved on and ran into a friend who congratulated me on my sale. Sale?!? I hadn't even looked at my work. Hooray!

Grace © Lissa Banks 2017

At about halfway around the room the director hit the mic and began announcing the winners. The woman I congratulated earlier received an honorable mention, then a second was announced and a third. I was surprised, for some reason I thought my humble offering would have been in that group. Must be a third place. Nope, not me. Nor second. I was astonished to hear my name called as having won first prize for the second year in a row! I was totally blown away. Having received my prize and some congrats from friends and fellow artists I took a look at my paintings, the winner and the arrangement that complimented it and the other (Grace), complimented by the little red dot meaning it had been sold.

Hopkinton Center for the Arts - Arts in Bloom 2018

I've on cloud nine ever since, my jet lag banished and my energy high to get back into the studio and paint away.

May 20, 2018 UPDATE: A couple of days ago I received more excellent news. Seems that Redemption also sold! So really, this post should be named "Three-Fer"!

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Everything's Relative

Here are the ten phases of painting, at least in my book:

• Enthusiasm - Defined as the stage when I have selected an image and can just picture it in my head how it will turn out. I can't wait to start the new project and tend to dive in head first, almost before cleaning my last pallet.

• Optimism - The drawings look good and I've got it transferred to the canvas and have blocked in the color. Everything is going swimmingly and I lose myself in the project. 

• Fear - Suddenly something looks off. The more I try to resolve the issue the worse it seems to get.

• Avoidance - Every time I walk past my studio I wince in pain at the...

• Loss - Of all of my previous enthusiasm and optimism. I find excuses not to paint. This is when a good deal of housework gets done. Even brass gets polished.

• Resolve - Gritting my teeth I convince myself I can fix this and move ahead.

• Despair - Prior fears get the best of me and I start doubting the whole thing.

• Distance - I start looking at it from 20 feet away and, hmmm, it doesn't look half bad. I check it out in the morning as I head down for my coffee and again at night before I go to bed and I start thinking things might be okay.

• Renewal - I take a "to hell with it" attitude and forge ahead. Inevitably the background gets finished and things begin to look good. I add highlights and deepen shadows and I squeak through to...

• Ta da! It all falls into place and I come to love the thing that a few days ago was a hopeless mess. 

Relativity © Lissa Banks 2018

Such is the life cycle of a painting. I named this one Relativity because time seemed to have stood still during its completion. If I hadn't been tracking my hours at the easel I would have sworn it took me weeks and weeks to finish. It didn't...it was a relatively quick finish. The pain and agony are forgotten and I start thinking, mmm, maybe I should start painting people again.

I invite you to visit my website where you can now 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.

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Mocking

The fourth in my most recent series of tulip portraits is a departure from the up close and personal nature of its predecessors. It's both simpler and more complex.

I was drawn to the photo for the sinuous nature of the leaves and stem and to the strength of the blossom...so perfect, so proud. And I loved the messy cacophony of the shadows cast by the five-arm chandelier that lit the subject. The flower came together quickly, the shadows less so. As I wrestled with the layers of tint and shade I came to wonder if it would ever fall together. And I wondered if it would ever speak to me beyond the difficulty it was presenting.

Mocking - Chandelier Jealousy © Lissa Banks 2018

It wasn't until it was complete that I saw it for what it was. Those shadows were jealous of the bloom. Hard as they may try to compete, they were but a reflection of the curious perfection that nature always manages to achieve in her infinite variety. They mock the flower but they mock themselves in the process.

I can't help but think about the current state of our humanity. We seem to have forgotten that we are all imperfectly created out of the same oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, calcium, and phosphorus. We love our children and breathe the same air. We all eat, sleep, yearn, cry, fear, want, laugh and triumph in the same way. And yet, whether it's scrawled on city buildings or plastered on billboards or shared on Twitter, we berate each other and treat each other as if they are not us. We seem oblivious to the fact that as we mock others we, in turn, mock ourselves. How silly, really, it is. Silly if we were only shadows on a wall.

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.

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Getting Brave

I don’t make New Year resolutions but I do try to set annual goals that sometimes take on an aspirational tone. This year’s theme leaned towards being brave and to be vulnerable. I certainly bit off a huge chunk to chew early on. You see, I took the plunge and mounted a solo exhibition.

Believe it or not I’m a quasi-government official, on a strictly volunteer basis…I’m an advocate for the arts here in my little town. I sit on a council whose charge is to distribute state money earmarked for arts and culture via a grant process. We also solicit shows that run in our local library.

When there was a rather large gap in our exhibition calendar I offered to put my paintings up for a month or two. The trick was that I had to pull it all together in a week. YIKES! This was my first time around this block and knew it would all be on me…the hanging, the labels, the whole enchilada. Double YIKES!

Solo show - Norfolk Library 2018

Lucky for me most of my pieces were framed and was able to expedite frames for the ones that weren’t. And I had a son nearby who was willing to help me schlep and hang the show. I pounded out an artist statement and tried to create a rationale for the pieces I selected. It was hard, but an excellent exercise.

Solo show - Norfolk Library 2018

An enthusiastic visitor

I wanted the whole thing to be cohesive but interesting and accessible. I didn’t try to impress anybody because, quite frankly, I didn’t want to come off sounding stupid or highfalutin.  I wouldn’t know for sure how many people wandered through to see my work, I just prayed that someone came to the reception!  Between the flu and the weather the turnout was small but hearty. My biggest fan by far was also my smallest.

When I first started showing my work I was a wreck having avoided it like the plague for so long prior. I’d rationalized that my work was for my own pleasure and not others which allowed me to avoid criticism. So when I finally did show, to my everlasting surprise and pleasure, I found people to be kind at the very worst and encouraging, even enthusiastic, at best. 

I have found a wonderful community of artists who each have sat in an empty space hoping for others to join them for a glass of wine, a bit of comradery and appreciation of the work. 

And I have found great reward in opening up myself, being vulnerable and being brave.

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.

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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.

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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.



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