Biography

Art lovers have been connecting with and acquiring Lisa Linch paintings for more than a decade. Drawn in by astute color harmonies and compositions so inviting as to defy resistance, viewers are rewarded on emotional and purely aesthetic planes, richly and satisfyingly, in painting after painting. Professional, perfectionist, focused, Lisa brings an arsenal of passion, training, and experience to her easel. “Painting is my first love affair,” says Lisa. She means it in the sense of being her first priority and in the sense of being the thing that caught her earliest attention. It has never let go. “I paint because it makes me feel good,” says Linch. “It’s my one consistent source of peace and stability.” Those qualities show up in her work, as do many other splendid fruits of her impeccable training, international education, and lifelong tendency to keep surpassing her last achievement. Buoyant spirit invigorates her canvases with a component of mood that nicely balances the seriousness of her compositional and technical virtuosity.

Lisa Linch has made her name synonymous with lightly abstracted contemporary romantic subjects taken from life, imagination, and experience-filled memory. As an artist who puts design considerations ahead of others in executing a painting. Linch has recently seen a greater degree of abstraction find its way into her work. The challenge of painting an idea, a non-objective, intangible inner vision stokes the painter’s creative fires, surprises and delights established collectors, and expands her audience.

Lisa’s earliest painting memory recalls a seascape she painted while her father painted something brilliant at her side. Her mother lavished praise on Lisa’s juvenile conventions, but her father had empowerment in mind. “You want me to be honest,” he asked this very young child. “Your negative space has to be as interesting as your positive space.”

With her bar set high right at the start, Lisa has put to good use a series of opportunities to learn from the best teachers in the best environments. Drafting tables, easels, and frequent discussions about theory in art and architecture were the furniture of her childhood. Her father was first a student, then a teacher at the Chicago Institute of Art while Mies van der Rohe was Dean. Lisa’s early introduction to conceptual thinking about composition, balance, line, form, and design gave her an enviable foundation of theoretical and practical knowledge, and set the stage for the lifelong love of learning which only energizes her more with the passage of time.

After her mother passed away when Lisa was nine years old, her father encouraged her to think originally, to form her own conclusions, and to enjoy acquiring a comprehensive theoretical and practical foundation for a life of professional artistic achievement. Linch attended the University of Michigan’s renowned Interlochen National Music Camp, studying dance and flute. Her father then took her to Paris and Cannes, France, and then to Florence, Italy, where he taught at the Academia delle Belle Arti. Linch expanded her technical skills and artistic vocabulary in sketchbooks and diaries embellished with drawings. Accepted by the Rhode Island School of Design, Linch elected instead to earn a Bachelors degree at the University of Colorado. Next, she completed a three year program at the Colorado Institute of Art, where her assignments were the hardest she had ever experienced and exactly the preparation she wanted for her next step. She accepted a position as a project designer at Avenue in Chicago, where her work in concept, drafting, and client presentation segued to a project designer position at TVS in Atlanta. There she specialized in designing law firms, up to 350,000 square-foot office buildings with very specific requirements, tight deadlines, and a demanding clientele. Eighty-hour weeks were the norm until an expressway auto accident in 1991 made Lisa rethink her career. When she recovered enough to resume work, she left the freeway and corporate world behind to begin painting full time in her studio. It didn’t take long for Lisa to find gallery representation in the Southeast and in the Southwest. She traveled to Santa Fe for her openings, and after each one, felt more at home in that high-desert artists’ haven than in Atlanta. For Linch, Santa Fe has its own abundance of unique appeals, including the creative atmosphere of a European art city, visible in the people, the rhythms of daily life, and the uniqueness of local color.

With familiar still-life imagery, musical instruments and notation, text, and the illusion of handwriting as elements, Linch composes, colors, and texturizes objects and voids in rich, painterly surfaces that lead, entice, and seduce the eye. Café society, home life, and moments of special languidness or excitement set the stage for Lisa’s figures. Formal or casual, youngish or more mature, Lisa’s people are easy to identify with and to want to be around. She gives the viewer full interpretive license with symbol, setting, and subject. Her paintings are satisfying from the purely technical perspective of design, while offering the richest rewards to viewers who include emotional resonance in their art evaluation criteria.

Titles give insight into the artist’s vision of a particular painting. Taken like a ten-year poem, they illuminate an artist’s purpose. Lisa is not afraid to make things pretty. Yes, pretty. “There are no hidden meanings, no political or humanitarian reasons for why I paint,” the artist says with honest conviction. “Design aesthetics come first. You don’t have to look for meaning. My paintings are a way to expose my emotional life without psychobabble. I just want to convey a pretty picture.”

I am sometimes asked about my philosophy of art, why I am so through and through a painter. I think of something contemporary thinker Anthony de Mello shared. “To the woman who complained that riches had not made her happy the master said ‘You speak as if luxury and comfort were ingredients of happiness; whereas all you need to be really happy, my dear, is something to be enthusiastic about.’”

I paint because it makes me feel good. As Jasper Johns observed, “sometimes I see it and then paint it; other times I paint it and then see it. I have no ideas about what the paintings imply about the world. I don’t think that’s a painter’s business. He just paints without a conscious reason.” I don’t paint like Johns, but he sure described the way I feel about painting. I am excited by design and aesthetics.

Painting consistently brings me peace and stability. I love it when I am challenged or surprised in a painting. I never want to stop learning. I admire the artist who said at age 86, “I think I’m starting to get this.” I hope to die, mucholder than that, still learning to paint.

Lisa Linch

Lisa's works can be seen at Waxlander Gallery, 622 Canyon Road.
Hours: 9:30-5:30 daily. (505) 984-2202 or (800) 342-2202.

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