Lisa Carroll-McMahon O’Connor
Lisa Mac
Artist’s Statement
Lisa O’Connor is an abstract modernist painter working with mixed media/impasto on on canvas. She use bright, bold colors, broad strokes and deep texturing; sometimes the canvas is practically screaming! Her goal is to make you feel, make your heart scream too.
Lisa’s Process…
Every painting she makes becomes a torrid love affair for this artist. “When I begin, I immediately fall in love. Every strike and stroke on the canvas is glorious and right”. It really is love at first site. Then, she begins to build up layers of textures and colors with mixed mediums such as gels and pastes which then call out to be touched, to be stained, to be made more beautiful and interesting. Soon, a battle ensues, between perfection and imperfection, between calm and chaos. “My love turns to hate and back again”. Chaos continually shrouds the silent flat plain and she works to beat it into submission, to create a level “sharing” of the canvas. The calm vs. chaos must have equivalent real estate- an equality of frenzy, depth and negative space. Lisa’s goal is to attain the perfect balance between electrified brightness and solemn, quiet darkness so the eyes can feed on frenzied visual and then rest in the negative space, to then circle back again. Without the calming negative, you cannot appreciate excited lines, shapes, patterns, and bold colors. “The battle on each canvas eventually wears me out and speaks ‘I am done’; the love affair is over, the painting is complete. And then I must move on to the next”.
Touchy-Feely…
If Lisa’s work touches your heart and speaks to you, she encourages you to physically touch the canvas surface. This will not damage the piece. Feel the unexpected, the varied round, smooth, and sharp textures, the depth and relief, the imprinted modeled layers. Grasp the texture, take a spiritual bite out of it, feel it… as does she…. Feel it in your fingertips, in your open palms. Seeing and touching the finished canvas can elicit a sensual experience and she hopes you too will fall in love with the paintings as both an object and as a uniquely personal inspiration. And maybe one will become your next love affair too. Lisa’s drive to keep painting is innate and she is always looking forward to the next blank canvas so her soul may jump in and become one.
Lisa’s Thoughts…
My art explores the external and internal, the spiritual and physical, that surrounds us in our everyday lives. I am engrossed in the notion of beauty from colors, textures, and patterns. Throughout my life, influences in my art have come from the physical world, and I endeavor to supplement these with the addition of a little faerie dust, imagination and luminosity- to make a bit of magic come to life on each canvas.
In many of my works, I employ an array of patterns and symbolic circles layered to create unique forms in and of themselves. These shapes evoke a sense of illusion of space and movement alluding to a spiritual sense, a presence, beckoning the viewer to look closer and touch. I often abandon the paint brush and create marks with objects that inspire me. Thus, I hope my finished works celebrate the imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete.
Make Each Day Your Own Masterpiece…
Brief Bio
Lisa was born in San Francisco, CA, 1966. Growing up in the Haight Ashbury, her childhood was shaped by the Hippie Generation, flowers and tie-dye, and freedom of expression. She majored in Fine Arts at UC Berkeley, specializing in printmaking and painting. She enjoyed showing her works in the East Bay. After college, she worked professionally in set design and graphic arts. Currently, besides being a painter, she is a graphic designer in Sonoma specializing in wine/beer labels, signage, and tourism-directed marketing materials.
The 2017 Sonoma Firestorm burned down Lisa’s art studio, which housed her portfolios and past works, along with her family home in Glen Ellen. The devastation created incredible loss. Fire has influenced her new works, more in the tone of a survivor than victim of loss. Lisa has rebranded herself since then, making a new beginning, signing her works as LisaMac, her updated persona. The fires and losses ignited a new passion and energy to paint the abstracted life around her.
“Inspiration for my work comes from living in the Bay Area my whole life… being immersed in a grand diversity of culture, people, lifestyle, economics, politics, and spirituality. Thus, the battle between opposing forces, the calm vs. chaos, and hopefully the balance of the Bay Area’s unique composition, emerges harmoniously in my paintings.”