Lisa Pressman

Lisa Pressman earned her BA in Art from Douglas College, Rutgers University and an MFA from Bard College.

Her work has been exhibited extensively throughout the U.S. and abroad, including The Hunterdon Art Museum, Clinton, NJ (2014), the Rosenfeld Gallery, Philadelphia, PA (2013); Therese A. Maloney Art Gallery, College of Saint Elizabeth, Morristown, NJ; group shows at SEFA; and Butters Gallery, Portland, OR. Additionally, Pressman's paintings have been included at The Cape Cod Museum of Art, Dennis, MA; Western Carolina State University Museum, Cullowhee, NC; and at the A Gallery in Provincetown, MA.

Pressman's work is included in many public and private collections. She teaches painting locally and nationally. The artist lives and works in West Orange, NJ.

Artist Statement:

My work engages and explores feelings, both emotional and physical. I came of age during the reign of minimalism, which to me seemed alien, excluding as it did passion and spontaneity. My initial foray into art-making was in ceramics. I loved how it employed thought, mood, impulse, and action to give shape to form.  Process artists like Eva Hesse spoke to me, whose interaction with materials and insistence on imperfection spoke of an unquenchable humanness.

As a painter, I embrace the ability to use materials to create tactile surfaces. There is a primary impulse to getting one's hands on something and discovering what one can do with it. The ensuing goal is to get myself out of the way and let the transformation happen.  My hand becomes the fulcrum between internal center or heart and the external world, such that how I hold the brush, the razor blade, or the scraper, and the pressure of every mark is a mapping.