Graduate Show at JFK 2008

This is my work that was featured in the show. The conclusion of achieving my M.F.A has been amazing!

What is my relationship to my audience

What is my relationship with my audience?

My greatest hope is that my audience “gets” my work and my greatest fear is that no one will show up. Does that sound neurotic? Maybe...it is just an ideal.
Although while creating in my studio or in the forest, I never think about my audience or their response. This relationship between myself and the viewer is formed in public space.
In my paintings and installation, I dance between exploring altered states of consciousness, and or ritual inspired by my travels to sacred places, or by my dreams(subconscious.) I feel that my creativity is the evocation of the sublime within myself. This all comes from my personal experience, but through my process my work seems to transcend boundaries into the universal.

When viewing my work I attempt to activate my audiences imagination and intuition. My hope is while looking at my work, they can journey somewhere and find meaning within that experience. When ever I get feedback from my work I am overwhelmed and moved that my work is communicating my intention. As well as I feel a deep sense of connection with my audience that dissolves the "other."

This is a reaction from my collector, who is now living with painting that I entitled “Knowth”

“I really love it. Thank you for creating it. It brings me so many emotions when I look at it. My mind wonders to places that I am afraid to go but at the same time brings me hope and certainty that I will find clarity and light. It is like facing the darkness of the spirit but at the same time, in the background, there's light, there's hope. It is a dark painting, I wouldn't label it beautiful, it is more than that, more like a portal. The textures, the colors and layers are incredible to me.”
-Danielle Molonski.

My site specific Earth Art takes on a slightly different relationship with the viewer. Primarily in this work I am honoring Nature. This work is also temporal. A key aspect to this series is the witnessing and of the interaction of the work by another to activate its potential for the witness to remember something they have forgotten. My intention is for my shrines to evoke introspection and a sense of the sacred for those who stumble upon them in a forest or in a city. Although, I do not know if anyone ever experiences this work. Synchronistical at a party I was talking to my friend’s husband about what I was up to in terms of my art and I said I was creating tree shrines around the Bay Area. He in shock said did you create one in Mill Valley? I did and he found it... ah the Universe.



“ I stumbled upon a sacred moment. My nephew and I went walking on a wooded trail near our home. He is twelve years old and loves the woods. We are glad to be close. But even in the woods we were distracted. Thinking of other things, not particularly present with each other or where we were. We stumbled upon the shrine at Cascade Falls, and it awoke something inside us. What is this? We wondered. Look at these colors…around this beautiful tree, and resonant energy ... this is where people have gathered to honor this place. And so we finally entered into a place where we were, and arrived, home at the falls.”
Bennett Johnston

My relationship with my audience for me on a personal level is about reception and validation. I feel it is a healthy one, it helps me grow as a being in time, as well as in the eternal. For both of us, viewer and artist I feel it is a beginning of a dialogue between object, person, nature, and psychic space. The web of connection is being formed between cultural expression and transformation.
Within this " I celebrate that... Art lives at the edges of life and spirit. and can be experienced by all." PR. PHD.
Namaste, Lisa

My Goals as an Artist

What are my goals as an artist?



This is such a serendipitous question as I graduated on Saturday with my M.F.A. (yes!) and I need to focus on what is the next step and what does that look like.
On my pragmatic page it looks like my need to create a list of goals of what I need to accomplish to “make it” in the art world. I need to put on my business hat and create a website, a marketing strategy, apply to shows and galleries with proper documentation. I have to update my business cards. I have to search for opportunities and it goes on and on. My goals need to be carefully mapped out for me to make it all happen. It is a high-risk business and my product is my art and my grand vision.

My ultimate goal is to be self-sustaining artist creating, selling my work and teaching art. I also want to open a healing arts studio, which I call the Green House Studios. This would be a community space for new paradigm artists and thinkers to build alternative systems in various communities. Ideally it would create an all-inclusive dialogue about art and its ability to empower. This would include art workshops, gallery space, and community outreach art programs. Lauren and I speak about this Blog as the virtual beginnings of such a studio.

For me equally mystifying is my passion for what I am doing.
Pragmatism seems to fly out the window as I create the work that I need to do. I became very comfortable just being a conduit and having creativity flow through me. I have come to believe that I am merely a channel for something greater than me that manifests through my art. As the artist Paul Klee wrote, “the artist does nothing other than gather and pass on what comes to him from the depths. He neither serves nor rules ---- He transmits…. he is merely a channel.”
My personal quest is to reunite art and the spirit. Akin to the alchemist’s work, which is the transformation of gross material into spiritual substance, I see my art as artifacts of my ever-transforming consciousness. My art and its process represent a humble quest to resurrect divination in my personal journey and into the community at large. As an artist my work gives the viewer a personal glimpse of my internal revelations.I speak of divination in its broadest sense, meaning that through my art and process I find myself in a continuum of discovering the unknown within myself and in the world that I live in. The motives and impulses behind my creative process are my shamanistic belief that through the process of creation, I align with dynamism and the divinity that is animated in all life.
Another goal of my work is revelation. I believe the core social issue that I am exploring in my painting, photography, site-specific works, and my teaching is abuse, which plagues society and the planet Earth. My approach to this work is not criticism, but a gentle revelation of what was and what can be. In all my work I explore and reveal the shadow of humanity by facing it, bringing it to surface, and on a personal level, finding a way to transform it.

To surmise, essentially my goal as an artist is the marriage of the paradox between pragmatism and pure creativity. As well as my service to the world at large. On an interpersonal level one could say that my art is my Yoga, the discipline that promotes the unity within myself. Carl Jung called this individuation.
I apologize for this got a little wordy.
Namaste, Lisa
I am interested in hearing what are your goals as an artist? And how do you keep one foot in each world to make Art your life and profession?

Wow! I graduated with honors!!!

HS Student of the Year Nomination:
To Lisa Rasmussen:

Lisa,

Five years ago, you entered the Department of Arts & Consciousness as a student in the Transformative Arts program. As your creative process unfolded, your paintings grew ever more compelling. By the end of three years, you transferred to the MFA program to more deeply engage your artwork. During this period, you continued to develop a program in transformative arts for clients at the Lincoln Child Center in Oakland. Your program bridged the gap between art as a transformative tool and art as a form of cultural expression. Your Lincoln Child Care Center students exhibited their work in a Sausalito Gallery and were the focus of an annual benefit for the Center. Because of your dedicated and creative work with the students at Lincoln Child Center, they have experienced the invaluable joy of self-expression and the all-important process of being seen in their fuller humanity. You have been a profound, transformative influence in their lives.



As an artist, your work has gone far beyond the limits of traditional painting. Your final MFA Exhibition entitled Caol Ait (Thin Spaces) reveals the full scope and power of your artwork, moving beyond the genre of painting into installation and environmental art, as well as movement, ritual and sculpture. In your teaching and in your artwork you celebrate the realization that art lives at the edges of life and spirit. You explore and then dissolve the boundaries between inner and outer, self and other and in so doing represent the highest ideals of Holistic Studies. You are an outstanding individual, and we are proud to nominate you as Student of the Year. Congratulations and best wishes for continued success.



Peter M. Rojcewicz, PHD

Dean, School of Holistic Studies

What an honor an exciting day!