This season, we’re filling the gallery with wonderful art for everyone's desire, temptation and budget, and we’d like to introduce you to Oregon artist Lisa Kaser. Lisa is a contemporary mixed media and print artist who draws on her successful illustration background to create mixed media sculpture and prints. "I am an optimist," the artist explains. "I like communicating sentiments of connection and possibility and I think a lot of folks like that. Also, my characters have an oddness to them. This sets them apart from our world enough to allow for greater interpretation from the viewer. Humor also helps to dissolve a too serious overtone, so the ideas remain playful and accessible." High Desert Gallery is honored to represent Lisa Kaser at our downtown Bend gallery location, 10 NW Minnesota Avenue at The Oxford.
Image left: Leaving Without Socks or Shoes, Lisa Kaser, Mixed Media Sculpture
HDG: Can you describe your studio - where is it, what it looks like?
Lisa Kaser: I have a little 2 bedroom house in SE Portland and my studio is a bit all over the house. In the basement I have a workbench in one corner where I create all my sculptures-set up with work stations for waxing, carving, sanding, sewing and assembling. The other side of the basement is designated for all my fiber work and storage of fleece, cloth and felt scraps and yardage. Two long tables and upright thick corrugated panels lean against the walls to provide work surfaces where I can lay out or pin up felts and large sewing projects.
HDG: What are your favorite materials to work with?
Lisa Kaser: For my sculptures, I favor oak galls for heads and bodies, the steel tines from street sweeper brushes for building armatures, my handmade felt cloth, and beeswax. For my illustrations, I draw in recycled kraft paper sketchbooks and layout my finished collages on heavy cotton pulp taupe colored paper from France and finish with water color, ink and graphite.
HDG: Where do your materials come from?
Lisa Kaser: I gather the oak galls in the Fall when they are exposed in the oak trees or fall to the ground, and the sweeper bristles I pick up on the street when I go for daily walks. In addition to constantly gathering on my own, I have many friends who supply me with the bristles and galls year round along with a myriad of found objects and cast-offs, so I am well stocked. When I make felts, I usually make yards from different natural fleeces and dye lots so I have a plentiful collection of colors to cut from throughout the year. The beeswax I use either comes from reused candle stubs or natural beeswax pastilles from local beekeepers.
HDG: Is there any meaning behind your choices?
Lisa Kaser: Over the years, through trial and error, I have found materials that I like working with and that stir my aesthetic sensibilities. I had carved in different hard and soft woods for heads and bodies until a friend gave me some oak galls. The galls, once dried and cured, made a perfect material for my little creatures. It was easy to carve and embed materials into and I loved the natural roundish/oblong forms which worked beautifully with the beeswax.
I prefer materials that I can salvage, reuse or make. For instance, the street sweeper bristles I have been collecting for years-most everyone would not even notice them or not recognize them for having any use. For me, they have become the primary material for all my armatures. They are the perfect material! Made out of steel they develop a rich patina, they are malleable but incredibly strong so I can bend them by hand and they are flat so I can stitch them onto cloth or wrap them together with waxed linen thread to build bigger shapes. This has great meaning to me from the standpoint of recognizing value in something discarded and what simple ingenuity can produce.
Image Left: On The Way to Somewhere Wonderful, Lisa Kaser, original illustration.
HDG: Do you remember when you first realized this was the direction you wanted to pursue?
Lisa Kaser: Hmmm. I made a definitive switch from theater and dance to visual arts in fibers in my third year of college. My father and brother were artists and though I had loved drawing and sewing at an early age, I really wanted to forge my own path. I made the decision when I discovered felt making in an off-loom class at University of Oregon and never looked back. My drawing and painting was something I completely took for granted and never marketed until I started illustrating blank canvas book/grocery bags 10 years ago. I had always used canvas bags for my own groceries and starting decorating them with my drawings and text. I started getting requests for them when I shopped, but then people would cut out the images from the bags to frame, so that prompted the start of my print business and working full-time on illustrations.
HDG: What comes first - the story or the image? Or do they work together?
Lisa Kaser: I love to write and collect interesting words and names. I also draw constantly, so I think the images and titles are floating around in my head simultaneously. Sometimes the characters find their way to the page first and a title is then developed, but I have so many interesting words that I want to use in titles that sometimes that is what spurs the little scenario and how the characters will relate to one another.
HDG: How important are your collaborations to your overall direction?
Lisa Kaser: Sometimes very significantly. The latest collaboration I did with friend and photographer, Grace Weston for the Art in the Pearl Collaboration Show, lead us to consider doing a children's book together and also giving consideration to starting a business together for commercial work.
HDG: What do you enjoy most about creating?
Lisa Kaser: Just the constant learning of how and what I want to communicate and because the creative process is a combination of the known and unknown- it always remains a mystery until you reveal it. It is the unexpected element that occurs that is most enjoyable and compelling.
We invite you into our downtown Bend gallery location, at 10 NW Minnesota Avenue at The Oxford, to see Lisa’s work.
High Desert Gallery
10 NW Minnesota Avenue at The Oxford
Bend, OR 97701
541-388-8964
www.highdesertgallery.com
Open Daily 10am-6pm, Sunday 11am-5pm
About High Desert Gallery: High Desert Gallery & Custom Framing, The Art & Soul of Central Oregon™ is an award winning fine art and custom picture framing gallery with retail gallery locations in downtown Bend, Oregon and Sisters Oregon. High Desert Frameworks!, the award-winning framing studio for the gallery, is located at 61 NW Oregon Avenue at Lava in downtown Bend, Oregon. The gallery specializes in Central Oregon Artists & Beyond™ and Stellar Custom Framing. For more information please visit: http://www.highdesertgallery.com or call toll free 1-866-549-6250.
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