Lisa Atkinson’s relationship with art began long before she ever considered it a serious path. Growing up by the beach in Santa Monica, she spent her childhood watching the Pacific shift through its daily moods—soft morning haze, sun-splashed afternoons, and the evening light melting into the horizon. These impressions stayed with her, forming the quiet foundation of her visual world. By First Grade, she had already won First Place for a Miro reproduction. In high school, she sold a mixed-media collage. That early sense of connection—someone responding to something she made with her hands—left a mark. Art wasn’t just a hobby. It was a form of communication, and one she instinctively understood.
Lisa followed that pull through years of study across several cities and countries. Otis-Parsons and UCLA gave her grounding in technique. Cambridge University expanded her perspective. L’Academie du Port Royal in Paris and the Sorbonne helped her dive deeper into the history and philosophy of art. By the time she earned both her B.A. and M.Arch degrees, she had developed a hunger for expressive landscapes and portraiture, drawn to scenes that conveyed energy, atmosphere, and internal weather.
Her artistic influences come from painters who built emotional depth through color and structure. She looks to Maynard Dixon’s sweeping western scenes, N.C. Wyeth’s sense of adventure, Childe Hassam’s shimmering light, Richard E. Miller’s rich palette, Konstantin Korovin’s theatrical warmth, and Lovis Corinth’s charged, expressive brushwork. Through them, Lisa found guidance—but also permission. Her work embodies the rhythm of Impressionism while embracing the emotional grit of German Expressionism. Texture, color, and mood take precedence over perfect representation. She paints from instinct, memory, and feeling.
That instinct was tested in ways she never expected. After the Palisades Fire destroyed her home, Lisa faced the kind of loss that strips everything down to essentials. With much of her physical world gone, she turned back to her materials, using painting as a lifeline. It wasn’t about producing a polished body of work. It was about stabilizing herself, creating scenes that allowed her to breathe again.
One of those pieces is an abstract acrylic on birch wood panel—an imagined garden tunnel. She describes it as something she had to paint rather than planned to paint. The devastation around her left a void, and her response was to fill it with color that suggested life continuing in quiet, resilient ways. The panel glows with turquoise and chartreuse, tones that suggest water, wind, and growth moving in unison. The shapes swirl, expand, and open, almost like an invitation to walk through them. Nothing about the image is literal, yet it radiates calm. The work doesn’t deny what happened. Instead, it offers a way forward—a reminder that creation can coexist with loss.
Another piece, Hidden Heights, comes from her long relationship with the Pacific Ocean. Living in Los Angeles, she has watched the coastline change and kelp forests disappear. The sea has always been part of her internal landscape, and in this painting, it becomes a place of illusion and transformation. Forms rise and fall the way waves do. Light slips across the surface, revealing one thing and hiding another. The painting carries a sense of longing—both for what has vanished and for what remains, even in altered form.
Lisa describes it as an exploration of colors that represent longing and belonging, darkness and light, sinking and floating. Her gestures vary: grounding strokes that anchor the space and swirling drifts that lift it. The result sits somewhere between sea and sky. This ambiguity is important to her. Life, as she puts it, often feels like a mystery she can’t quite grasp, but it’s still an interesting adventure. The painting reflects that sentiment. It doesn’t offer an answer. It offers an experience.
What ties Lisa’s work together is her way of painting through emotion rather than around it. She doesn’t treat art as an escape from reality but as a way to shape it into something she can understand. Even in abstraction, her images feel connected to lived moments—the burn of loss, the comfort of water, the memory of sunlight on sand. She paints from a place where personal history and imagination overlap.
Today, Lisa continues to build a body of work that carries both the imprint of her past and the curiosity of someone who keeps looking for new ways to interpret her world. Her paintings draw from years of training, but they also move freely. They hold beauty, tension, ambiguity, and hope. In a way, they function like the ocean she grew up beside—constantly shifting, never still, and always revealing something new if you stay long enough to look.
