Artist's work matures high above the city lights

By Libby James
North Forty News

Lisa Cameron's spacious studio sits on a bluff overlooking Horsetooth Reservoir. Inside a stunning array of raku-fired pots rests on tables. On the tarp-draped floor dozens and dozens of cans of house paint are lined up. Gallons and quarts sit in orderly rows, no drips or dribbles running down their sides or clogging up the edges of their carefully replaced lids. And alongside them are buckets filled with paint sticks, most pristine and new, ready to be used to drip and dribble paint across a canvas. A huge canvas, partially finished, lies flat on the floor; another, even larger, rests on an easel.

"Paint sticks," Cameron explained, "are free."

She gathers them up by the fistful at paint stores where she frequently buys "mistakes" that have been improperly mixed. With these tools and materials she creates the paintings for which she is known and respected in galleries in Boulder; Scottsdale, Ariz.; Fort Collins; Estes Park and the Virgin Islands.

Cameron, a graduate of the University of Wyoming who has a degree in art with an emphasis on painting, hasn't always worked with the enthusiasm and abandon that is evident in her current work. The swooshing swirls, skinny dribbles and strategically placed drips and drops she uses paint sticks to produce, and that have become her trademark, are the result of a long search for a style all her own.

Her quest, she said, was assisted by her move from a small home/studio in Loveland to her current home in Spring Canyon Heights on the southwest side of Horsetooth Reservoir. It was there that she found the environment that enabled her to bring her work to a new level.

"No one bothers me here," she said. "I planted all the trees on my place. I love listening to meadowlarks and house wrens that sing all day long in the summer. Orioles and hummingbirds hang around because I feed them. Fawns, foxes, raccoons, skunks, coyotes, rabbits and occasionally a mountain lion, bear or elk show up outside my door. I planted flowers to become models for my paintings, but instead I created a grand salad bar for the wildlife. I never get tired of looking at the clouds, sunsets and lights of the city below."

Cameron has always been fascinated with color and the way it is used - in combinations - in extremes - in varying degrees of intensity, but for a long time, all that she understood about color was not reflected in her work. It was as if she were waiting for the right medium to express her convictions about color.

"Victor Flack, my professor at the University of Wyoming, hammered color theory into me," she said. "He had strong opinions and wasn't very popular with the other students, but I bought into everything he had to share about the use of color. I learned so much from him."

Cameron was no stranger to the art world when she entered college. Born in Bedford, Pa., she moved to Cheyenne and graduated from Central High School there. She was strongly influenced by her mother, a painter, jewelry maker and art teacher. Often she tagged along to workshops with her mom and picked up tips and techniques that she incorporated into her work. By the time she was ready for college, she had an array of art scholarships from which to choose.

After graduation she set out to make a living with her art. At the time she did structured and realistic pieces that were soon accepted by a Loveland gallery. Over the years she has been involved in a number of art in public places projects, from enhancing transformer boxes with native wildflowers to a 12-panel three-dimensional historical mural installed at the entrance to the town of Monument. She continues to do portraits on commission and illustrations for children's books.

Cameron loves to paint outdoors and often slips outside her studio into the bright sunshine to add layer after layer of color to her paintings. The process begins with carefully executed pencil sketches, using photos she has taken of the flower, butterfly, fish or bird that is her subject. Next she applies a foundation layer to the canvas, creating a composition using broad brush strokes in an impressionistic style.

"Then I begin to paint unabashedly," she said, "filling the canvas with splashes of paint that come out of the excitement I feel for the piece I'm working on."

Her work grows, layer by layer, until it takes on a woven texture.

While Cameron's drips and splashes give the illusion of randomness, they are anything but random. Step close to one of her pieces to get the full effect of her studied use of color. Step back and suddenly the images she has created become clear and vivid in all their colorful glory--fire-red tulips, orange poppies, busy bees, a sliced open pomegranate, hummingbirds in search of nectar.

"I used to feel stifled in my work," Cameron said. "Drip painting is exciting and freeing for me. I can explore my passion for color and incorporate all that I have learned about it in my work."

Painting occupies most of Cameron's time, but she also hand-builds pots that she fires, one at a time, outside her studio. She uses a modified western evolutionary raku process derived from the traditional Japanese method. Her pots illustrate her love of texture through the impressions she presses into the clay surface using handmade crocheted doilies. It is her way of preserving this intricate handiwork of women. She also molds "belly bowls," casting them from the outline of a woman's belly shortly before she gives birth.

Cameron's work can be seen at Trimble Court and Meko's Gallery and Framing in Fort Collins. Most summer days, one can find Cameron outdoors, painting or firing her pots and checking up on her plant and animal friends.