LISA LAUER
Oil Paintings
I consider myself primarily a landscape painter, but no matter the subject, I'm always hoping to evoke a certain precarious sensory state within the viewer. There is stillness and grace and beauty in nature, but also an undercurrent of imbalance, foreboding, and sometimes even outright chaos. It’s the tension between these states that I find most interesting.
I also like the challenge of transforming a flat surface into a topography the viewer wants to explore, an interest I can pretty clearly trace to having grown up in a mostly flat, industrial part of Ohio. Fortunately, my parents thought nothing of piling four small kids in a station wagon for road trips, so I spent many happy hours gazing out the car window at increasingly exotic landscapes.
When we moved to upstate New York, and later Virginia, I started tagging along with my mother to estate auctions. I was fascinated by the local folk art with its stoicism and odd perspectives, its elevation of the mundane to the mythic. As a teenager, I decided to try creating one of these strange paintings myself. Much to my surprise, it sold, and somehow that convinced me that I could become a painter like my mother.
After earning a degree in art history with a minor in studio art from Swarthmore College, I thought I would go on to study art restoration and eventually work in a museum. As it happened, I ended up in the tech industry. But in the back of my mind, there was always a singular goal: to eventually live where land meets sea and paint full-time. And finally, here we are.
