Veltz Fine Art | 4/1-4/18 | San Diego, CA

Fractures

Veltz Fine Art in San Diego hosts a new show for painter Lisa Bryson

The world may have not been ready for isolation on this scale. Locked in her studio because of the pandemic, painter Lisa Bryson puts it into perspective: “There is real fear here. We are not meant to experience isolation in this way. We need others. And we need to go outside. Yet we can’t.”

Like so many other artists, all Bryson could do was create, so she turned inward, to herself and the things that inspired her, to create the Homage series. “I knew I wanted to be more representational but also more abstract, so I immediately turned to the figure and the human form. That’s the common thread we all share as human beings—flesh and blood and bone and pain and experience,” she says. “I also painted my figures more emotionally exaggerated and kind of stoic. I wanted to capture the essence of who they are. I even let them wear whatever it is they wanted to wear, but absent was the expression, the laugh or the giggle.”Homage IV (Otto), oil on linen, 72 x 48"

Painted behind the figures were some of the artists who inspire Bryson: Francis Bacon, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Hokusai, Franz Kline and Takashi Murakami, among others. The figures, though, those are all Bryson as the paint is tight and detailed in places, but drifts away in huge chunks in others. At times it seems to drip, transpose, liquify and explode—distorted realism at its finest. Homage V (Lovejoy), oil on linen, 72 x 48"

Bryson, who is based in San Diego, California, will be showing these new works at a show opening April 1 at Veltz Fine Art in San Diego. “Lisa Bryson has harnessed the ability to trap time and space with an embrace to the futurist movement. The application of paint exposes the raw qualities of her process; Bryson utilizes the paint as a vehicle to ‘expand on identity’ that can only be appreciated in person,” the gallery notes about the show. “With a step back, time and motion and the figure move dimensionally in front of you. The Homage series is a spectacular combination of intriguing powerful portraits with nods to the great painters, and a visual feast for your eyes, bringing emotive human quality to the figures—not realism—but rather a palpable pulse in paint. Something not to be missed.”Homage III (Elena), oil on linen, 72 x 48"

The artist works using palette knives, as well as large cement trowels, and then comes in at the end with a brush for the fine detail. “Sometimes I end up just scraping off hundreds of dollars in oil paints, but that’s where I find the painting,” she adds. “I don’t think of myself as an abstract artist; I’m more representational than abstract. When I started this project, I just knew I wanted to challenge myself.”

The new works will be on view through April 18. —

Veltz Fine Art
2739 Historic Decatur Drive • Barracks 16 / Studio 101
San Diego, CA 92106
(619) 379-1808 • www.veltzfineart.com