Painting
Lisa Hammitte
Painting
Trussville, AL
lisahammitte.com
FB: Lisa Hammitte Art | IG: yellowhammerstudio
I am an artist, a creative person that sees snippets of life that need a way to be remembered. I think because I started painting later in life parallel to a high stress, serious career as a nurse anesthetist, I experience art as a means to express what life looks like outside of a predominately windowless operating room. As a child of failed marriage in the early 70’s, my earliest happy memories were playing in colors and painting with a retired art teacher that lived a simple life next to my grandparents beach house. The smell of turpentine and the brilliant red and yellow flowers she painted intrigued me as much as her peace in life and who she was. In middle school, I had an art teacher that gave me a slightly more formal introduction to art emphasizing composition and proportion. Then I turned into a teenager and got too busy for art….this stayed my excuse for the next three decades. I went to college, became an RN, then a CRNA, then a wife, then a mother of 3, then chief of a department and then my youngest daughter asked me to paint a cow of many colors. It turned out good enough that it still hangs in our home today. It also started me painting again. My family shared the painting on social media and I got requests from several friends for their own colorful cow. Then a few pet portraits were commissioned. In looking back, they were marginal in talent, but resembled their fur babies enough to capture further requests. I ventured into landscapes, impressionism, still life, abstract, portraits and semi realism searching for my style. I took a lovely oil painting class dabbling in oils again, but found myself too impatient and continued acrylics as my primary medium.(I believe that is from 30 years in anesthesia, where the drugs I give have a 60 second onset.)
In all this I have found life is too full to limit myself to only one style.I may paint a nurse with angel wings in a loose impressionism to portray a message that can’t said with realism.My next painting may be a bike race that demands tighter strokes representing the discipline of an athlete.Next I may paint a pet or animal portrait that has expression to melt the heart with loose but definitive strokes. At other times, I hear my near grown children discuss popular culture and I delve into pop art be it diamonds, kissing lips or other random symbols of modern society. On other days, I lean into the freedom of abstract art that relies on color and shape to express what I am feeling. I say all that to say that my art is expression of life that refuses to live in a single box. It is as eclectic as my life but with a clear vision… to share life and its joys intentionally!
