Low Down Articles
Artist Profiles - Lisa Creskey
Article 9 of 73
From the book Artists of the Gatineau Hill by Catherine Joyce. This article first appeared in the "Artist Profiles" column in the July 27, 2005 issue of the The Low Down to Hull and Back News.
Reprinted with permission. Search complete list of Low Down Articles.
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The Timeless Tunnel of Art
Lisa Creskey is a painter who works on canvas, clay and sculpture. "Painting is a tool for taking the ability to see and making it meaningful. It creates an emotional state that infuses you with energy."
Inspired by art history, Lisa is drawn to a figurative art where faces compel her - rising from her subconscious as if they have always been there. Her images seem to float behind a veil, reminiscent of an iconography that lies buried within us all - faces of Mother and Child, misted, androgynous, the delicate, dreamlike imprint of the human soul.
Her childhood itself was unusual. "My parents moved up from New York in the mid '60s and started a commune on a farm in Ripon, north of Montebello in 1970. We were the only English family for miles around. My childhood was spent with a lot of strange and unusual people drifting in and out of our lives."
With no TV and a father who produced a series of local newspapers - Farrellton's Jim Creskey would go on to found Ottawa's Xpress, to publish The Hill Times and most recently, to edit Embassy magazine - Lisa grew up drawing on long rolls of newsprint. Art History books surrounded her, as did her five siblings.
"I see the relationship between mother and child as central - it molds everyone. We become human through another person, through the love, care and attention of another. It is the same with art - it passes through you. It is a kind of devotion, a celebration of being alive, of honouring what you have been given."
At Concordia in Montreal and at the Parsons School of Art and Design in New York, Lisa honed her skills and deepened her knowledge of art history "Art is about emotional connection - establishing a relationship with what you see. When you study the Masters, it's like looking down a time tunnel to that moment of connection each artist felt - it's thrilling. It sends chills down your spine."
Lisa began with oil paint on large canvas but as her two children came along, she moved to smaller watercolours - delicate studies of butterflies and birds. "How can a bird not be a metaphor for the human spirit?"
For the last three years she has been experimenting with her mother, Ann Creskey, an acclaimed local potter, to produce an exquisite body of work on clay Painting her elusive images on the softly rounded forms created by her mother, Lisa has discovered a natural, almost genetic synchronicity in their work together.
"You see in art the same distilled experience across time - that intimate awareness of being human. It is so liberating. You are not alone. There is a continuity - as of generations in a family - in those moments of connection when the heart sees and the hand creates."
Lisa's work is showcased at the Potters' Guild Sale every November and at Ottawa's Art in the Park Festival every June. Her studio is on Pine Road.