Lisa Hesselgrave

Artist Statement

The focus of my work shifts between several themes: the atmospheric landscape / the figure as an abstraction of form and color / the narrative that occurs when the painted figure enters the painted place. After years of painting the landscape, and painting and drawing the figure in interiors, this body of work merges the two.

Mostly wooded and often dark, the places my figures inhabit are conjured from memory and imagination. Reflecting on the Germanic fairy tales of my childhood and mixing it with a dose of my current life in a semi-wooded area of Connecticut, I?ve re-imagined characters and situations from a grown-up perspective. In the past, when painting interior scenes, I have used a piece of furniture to serve as a character. In these newer pieces, I rely on shapely trees or bodies of water.

Color, light, form and structure are the essential components that provide limitless compositional challenges as well as a framework upon which I suspend images, both observed and remembered. I hope to continue to explore new media and new ways of revealing the poetry and mystery in the familiar, visible world.