Lisa Scadron is an American artist who creates abstract mixed media paintings and original digital prints. She was born, raised, and currently lives in Tucson, Arizona.
Through extensive travel, Lisa was exposed to art of all kinds from all over the world from a very young age. And growing up immersed in Southern Arizona's beautiful and unique Sonoran Desert landscape profoundly influenced Lisa’s internal identity and aesthetic. The Sonoran desert's color and vastness together with a deeply felt resonance with Georgia O’Keeffe’s art/words/life shaped how she saw and felt the environment around her. In the intense light and clear creosote-scented air, near the sharp-shaped mountains of blues, greens and purples, and under the expansive sky with the spectacularly saturated sunsets, Lisa learned to visualize her surroundings in terms of shapes, colors and compositions. As a result, many of Lisa’s paintings look like abstracted landscapes.
Her formal visual arts training was primarily through her public fine arts magnet schooling. Encouraged by her parents and grandfather, a painter, Lisa began oil painting lessons at age eight and has been making art ever since. She has exhibited artwork in the U.S. and internationally. Her art is part of corporate, hotel and hospital collections in the United States and private collections in the United States, Europe, New Zealand and India.
She earned a Bachelor of Arts in Human Biology with a minor in Art History from Stanford University and an Integrative Health Coach certification from Duke Integrative Medicine. She creates paintings and prints in her Tucson art studio, offers workshops in Writing for Your Health to non-profit and corporate clients, and helps individuals build a foundation for habitual self-care.
Trusting the Process
Raised in an intensely intellectual environment, which included art education and exposure to art from all over the world, I was encouraged to develop my artistic skills, but I was not supposed to actually be an artist (except perhaps in retirement, like my grandfather). I was also a competitive child athlete—enduring a career-ending injury that forced me to stop playing tennis at sixteen. By the time I reached high school, making art had become a refuge from the major parts of my identity—i.e., the straight-A student and the injured tennis player—a haven from all-things-cerebral, the intense structure of my daily life, the pervasive chronic pain, and the pressure to always achieve perfection and to win.
Making art allows me the freedom to not be cerebral. It is about the sensual and simple pleasure of finding out what materials can do and how I can shape them into something beautiful. There is an alchemy that happens if one can only get out of the way and go with the flow of the moment; that magic has its own time and rhythm and requires only the practitioner’s patience, willingness to let go of preconceived images and readiness to improvise.
Exploring materials in service of beauty, I configure multiple layers of textures, vivid colors, and iridescent materials into abstract paintings that are at once ethereal and earthy, expressing my visceral connection to the landscapes of the Southwest and the scapes in my mind. A work of art is its own world—invoking spaces of possibility.
Most of my prints originate from photographs of sections of my paintings that I then digitally transform—they are not reproductions of my paintings, but original digital art printed on aluminum.
To create my paintings, I use acrylic paints, metallic leaf and a range of mixed media, sometimes applying as many as ten layers on a canvas or panel and then excavating into those layers with palette knives, old kitchen utensils and other tools. Playing with the materials allows me to be present in the moment of making. I use that space to explore “mistakes” and “tangents," navigating the unknown territory of a work in progress. If I am patient enough to trust my creative process, beauty coalesces from the layers of media.