Essay By John Seed

Intuition will tell the thinking mind where to look next. - Jonas Salk

Lisa Pressman’s work, which is abstract but still very much inspired by the process of seeing, has a sense of visual “rightness” that only intuition can validate. Her work is process-oriented and each image represents a kind of gradual accretion of ideas and methods that wouldn’t be possible without the broad foundation of caprices and ruminations that preceded it.

Pressman and her work don’t fit neatly into any category even though it has some affinities with Abstract Expressionism. If a label is helpful, it might be better to call what she does Abstract Intimism. Like the French Intimistes — for example Vuillard and Bonnard — Pressman is attracted to the personal and the familiar, which she recasts into explorations of mood and color. Working in series, Pressman creates families of imagery that share thematic points of departure while generating individual works that are discrete and distinctive. Like the Intimistes, Pressman is also attracted to the idea that the formal elements of painting can address and transmit psychological nuance.

Some of Pressman’s artistic interests are directly rooted in her personal visual experience. Pressman has worn glasses since the age of five and the difference between her two visual worlds — with and without glasses — has impacted her work as an artist. When you see “micro” imagery in Pressman’s work, including fine textures and delicate lines, you are seeing the world through her glasses. These elements often play off “macro” elements of broad fields and fluid brushwork that relate to a world unsharpened by lenses.

One of Pressman’s tendencies is to work with something that might be recognized — texts, maps, features and formations — and to move them towards abstraction in a way that raises questions. The process of painting becomes a way of both revealing and obscuring, guided by intuition with the intention of luring viewers into an open-ended dialogue.

In the exhibition “Passing Through” Pressman uses transit as a metaphor, deals with the passage of time and also the passing of the artist’s 99-year-old Mother Adele, who spoke of trains, buses and riverboats in the final weeks of her life. The imagery of this series—including forms that evoke vehicles, portals and passageways—are rendered with a tender sensitivity that suggests the paradoxical stasis of substance and transformation. Fluid boundaries, overlaid geometries and scraped revelations add to and enhance the suggestions of impermanence.

Pressman’s “Passing Through II” presents forms reminiscent of vehicles in traffic. There is a rough geometry present in a red rectangle that seems to race across the painting’s lower half that makes it tempting to try and identify: could it be a van or bus racing down the street? Then again, the blunt form might best be thought of as a rectangle that draws our attention with its vivid, radiant color, but the colors that Pressman has surrounded it with are the colors of a city lit by streetlights. Wide curving lines suggest lanes, but seem to end in a nexus of calligraphic scribbles, while underlying textures, strokes and scrapings add to the overall mood of abstraction and transformation. Nothing stands still in the image, and every mark adds to its graphic electricity and sense of transience: it is a glimpse of a city that could only exist between memory and imagination.

A more subdued, subconscious energy animates “Secret Place.” Its discrete, stacked ovoids frame coded messages of color that pulse in a grey environment. The painting’s submarine palette of grey and black fields highlights its impulsive and unexpected turquoise outlines, red bubbles, yellow squiggles and—most surprisingly—a single soft block of flesh tone. “Secret Place” shows what Pressman is capable of at her best: she can infuse an abstraction with the feeling of presence and place while never veering too far towards literal description. The psychological pull of Pressman’s work, which reflects her intuitive approach, is especially strong in this work.

Pressman’s current work, with its confidence and variety, has earned her the respect of her peers. Artist friend Rebecca Crowell offers these observations:

I love the viewer involvement that Lisa’s work invites: the urge to examine the layers she has built with paint, drawing materials and wax, and the emotional response elicited by her vibrant colors, bold contrasts and mysterious forms. The way her work opens up visual conversation with the viewer is in keeping with who she is as a friend, teacher and collaborator with other artists: A person of depth who is open, engaging, intelligent and kind.

That’s high praise coming from a peer, but it has truly taken Pressman decades to make the body of work that deserves it. One senses in Lisa Pressman’s work a kind of hard-won integrity that comes from deep inside and which can’t be faked. Each of her paintings is very much itself: A personal and artistic exploration that couldn’t and shouldn’t have been painted any other way.