Collection: Lisa Moynihan

Art is the best part of me. I grew up in Laurel, Mississippi, with the Lauren Rogers Museum of Art one block from my home.

My earliest memory of creating art is attending a pottery class at the museum with my grandmother when I was six years old. The pottery didn’t stick, but the museum and I became close friends.

After college at The University of Mississippi where Jere Allen was my most influential instructor, I returned to Laurel and gravitated into a graphics arts career. A workshop with artist Wolf Kahn prodded me to seriously pursue painting.

I am strictly an oil painter, of mostly landscapes. I live in a landscape, on forty acres on a dead end road. The beauty of an overlooked pasture or a line of trees in late afternoon lights my fire. I’m constantly scanning fields I’ve seen hundreds of times for a shape, shadow, or color that looks completely fresh and can lead to a new painting.

Once I find it, I dissect it. Composition is the framework that holds up the color in a painting and I work with sketches and photographs to move around and balance the components.

The finished painting is a combination of tapping and pushing my creativity with an awareness of  the natural world around me.