Lisa Olesen

Lisa Olesen’s paintings explore landscape, but not in a conventional sense. She seeks to expose the essence of her environment, the scents and the dangers of lost and remote parts of our otherwise familiar English woodlands and hillsides. Using thick layers of paint she carves out her own experience of the countryside around her.   

Painting from memory, she carries images in her mind’s eye before committing her distillation to canvas. This process of reflection infuses her work as completely as her richly painted surfaces reveal the mossy banks, the hidden glades and the fallen timber of the land she inhabits.  The depth of paint and the complexity of the surface forces us to refocus and as our eyes adjust so her vision is revealed.  These are time-consuming paintings. They take time to show their depth and time to reveal themselves and enter our minds eye as surely as they have dwelt in the artist’s.