Biography
Excavating Memory, Layering Meaning
Lisa Pressman’s paintings are an exploration of memory, materiality, and transformation, where layers of history accumulate through an intuitive process. Working with encaustic, oil, cold wax, and mixed media, she scrapes, burns, and reworks surfaces, allowing each mark—whether buried or exposed—to hold the weight of experience. Her paintings evoke the passage of time, revealing the delicate balance between presence and absence.
For more than four decades, Lisa has expanded the language of abstraction, drawn to how materials serve as conduits for emotion and personal history. She embraces a tactile approach—sewing into canvas, carving into clay, and incising into wax. What was once solid is reshaped, what is obscured may resurface. Her works resemble aged manuscripts, fragmented maps, or artifacts holding traces of meaning just beyond reach.
The notion of what lingers beneath the surface is a driving force in her practice. Language appears in glimpses—familiar yet unreadable, dissolving into gestures. The marks she creates exist in a space between recognition and obscurity, emphasizing the fluid nature of memory and perception. Her compositions suggest containment yet resist definitive interpretation, inviting viewers into a quiet, open-ended dialogue of discovery.
The death of her son in 2019 profoundly influenced Lisa’s work, deepening her relationship with materiality. Burned marks, red-thread sutures, and layered surfaces became both acts of remembrance and reconstruction, embodying the resilience of transformation. Through layering and excavation, her work become meditations on what remains, marking time in a way that feels both intimate and universal.
She earned her BA in Fine Art from Douglass College, Rutgers University, and her MFA in Painting from Bard College. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally and is held in numerous private and public collections. She is represented by Susan Eley Fine Art (NYC), and Addington Gallery (Chicago). The artist recently had two solo exhibitions in New York City. One at Susan Eley Fine Art, 2022 and the other at The Painting Center, 2023. Her work has been featured in solo and group exhibitions at the Cape Cod Museum of Art, MA, Holter Museum of Art,MT, and Hunterdon Art Museum, NJ.
“Her work is emotionally intense, laden with the acute joys and sorrows that can only be accessed through profound suffering. She shares her journey with a deep generosity of spirit, and we want to travel with her, knowing that on some level it’s our journey as well.”
Meg Hitchcock, In the Studios blog
Lisa Pressman: The Alchemy of Process
My work is an ongoing excavation of memory, emotion, and materiality—an intuitive journey where surfaces accumulate layers of history. Each mark I make is a response to time, revealing and concealing fragments of experience. Working with encaustic, oil, cold wax, and mixed media, I embrace the tactile quality of my materials, allowing them to guide the evolution of each piece.
Shapes emerge like artifacts, evoking vessels of containment yet resisting clear definition. Fragments of language appear and dissolve, becoming gestures rather than concrete messages. The layering process is not just a structural technique—it is a metaphor for the shifting nature of memory, where presence and absence coexist, and meaning is constantly in flux.
Loss and impermanence are central to my work. The passing of my son in 2019 profoundly deepened my relationship with materiality, making each act of burning, stitching, and scraping a ritual of remembrance. These marks, whether erased, concealed, or revealed, speak to the fragility of existence. My paintings become meditations on what remains, an ongoing dialogue between transformation and continuity, exploring how time reshapes both material and memory.
Visually, my paintings feature rich textures, intense gestural marks, and dynamic color relationships. My non-dominant hand pieces blend lyrical color elements with neutrals, incorporating expressive mark-making. Light emerges from the layers, creating a luminescent quality that has remained a defining aspect of my work throughout my career. Excavated surfaces reveal hidden forms, evoking the process of archaeological discovery—bits of information emerging gradually, ultimately revealing a larger narrative. Lines and symbols in my compositions suggest a personal language, particularly in my "Messages" series, where they take on an almost hieroglyphic quality. Some works lean into dramatic contrasts, while others are more subtle, inviting an emotional engagement that extends beyond the immediate surface.
My process is rooted in both intuition and reflection. I do not seek to impose definitive narratives but instead invite contemplation. My paintings hold the residue of experience, asking viewers to engage with what is visible and what lingers beneath the surface. Each piece carries its own quiet history, waiting to be interpreted anew with every encounter. The act of layering, removing, and rebuilding is a way of making sense of what is lost and what is carried forward.
Ultimately, my work is about discovery—uncovering meaning through process, gesture, and material. In this continuous cycle of creation and erasure, I explore the tension between permanence and change, allowing each piece to exist in the space between knowing and mystery.
