Lisa D. Hickey – Friday Night Guest – November 19, 2021

( Submitted by Katherine Bellomo)

Lisa Hickey is an oil painter who captures on canvas the sensory experience of wandering through the forest.  She began her talk by discussing a series of ideas about “how to become an artist”. Some of her suggestions follow:

The starting point is to find your own voice and to create a consistent and cohesive body of work or series of pieces in order to get the attention of a gallery.  She also suggested showing your work in local cafés, restaurants, and even doctor or dentist offices.  Second was to find a mentor and find a community to advise you and help you grow.  Third was to find gallery representation by visiting galleries, applying to group shows and following up with emails. Often a gallery will find you at an outdoor show and she suggested applying to as many art shows as possible such as: The Toronto Outdoor Art Exhibition, Riverdale Artwalk, Cabbagetown Art Fair, Artwalk in the Square and Kensington Art Sundays, to name a few. She has worked in a number of shared studio spaces, which she found to be inspiring and to provide community.  Currently she works in her own private studio, which includes a reading corner as she spends time contemplating and viewing her work.

Lisa began her demonstration by showing us how she prepared her canvas with an under-painting of an acrylic base coat which must be totally dry before adding the oil pant to the canvas. For our demo she used a gold under-painting, which would be complementary to her finished piece where she planned to use blue and turquoise. She began by painting branches on the gold surface, and then added brushstrokes of blues, whites and titanium buff.

She paints with lots of paint, straight from the tube, in a thick buttery impasto style and using a hog bristle brush. She prefers alternatives to paint thinner and uses a benign non drying oil such as mineral oil or baby oil. Her paintings are all about analogous colors that she places side by side. As she painted for us, she juxtaposed light and dark tones next to each other and moved around the canvas with her focal point (in this case the sun) at the center of her movements.  Some photos of her work in progress follow here, and she told us that she would be adding burnt orange and salmon as the piece progressed.

For more information about this inspiring artist, and to view her finished pieces, please refer to the following:

Website: www.lisadhickey.ca

Facebook: www.facebook.com/lisadhickey

Instagram: www.instagram.com/lisadhickeyart