THE SLATE BLUES AND BONE WHITES OF SMOOTH RIVER rocks, the myriad greens of forestry, the golds of sunshine and cornfields, the glossy browns of pluff mud and the spectral sunsets over water. Nature, with its inhabitants, mysterious enigmas and startling beauty, is what artist Lisa Shimko believes invites one to experience childlike wonder.
“I grew up in rural Pennsylvania, and some of my favorite childhood memories are just roaming around in the woods, making little dams in the creek and picking up crawfish,” Shimko says.
Fascinated with the connection of the natural world to her own creative curiosity has led her to invent works of art that fuse elements of magical realism with what she refers to as “dream logic.”
“I’ve always been a curious person, even when I was a kid, and I’m sure I drove my parents nuts,” she recalls. “I was an avid reader. I was always getting into stuff and trying to figure out how things work in the natural world. I love biology, and I’m interested in symbolism, the way we express ourselves.”
She admits she wasn’t a “girly girl,” stating: “I was always exploring, getting dirty. The house we lived in butted up against a farm, so there were woods and fields a few feet away. I loved watching the rotation of the crops, getting lost in cornfields, and I’d pick up bugs, dig in the dirt, look for bones and rocks.”
Shimko’s curiosity has been present as far back as her memories take her. An epiphany sprang forth in one of the first science classes when she viewed pond water through a microscope.
“I was like, whoa—the different colors, the connection to the natural world … There is such an overlap to our humanity,” she says. Shimko references the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, whose concepts introduced theories of symbolic systems of animal species being in direct relation to humans defining their own social groups.
Shimko’s allegorical animal paintings suggest the dichotomy between nature and humanity. Her subjects’ piercing gazes seem to hint at a secret or invitation that each observer can decipher according to how they interpret it. Surrounded by brilliant hues within surreal settings, they have a slight cheekiness juxtaposed with both the divine and the mundane—the incessant interplay within all living things.
After high school, Shimko migrated to Philadelphia in 1990 and entered the University of the Arts, securing a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in painting and a minor in art therapy. An English professor introduced her to prolific writing, a stream-of-consciousness practice that she uses to this day, a nonlinear method that allows her to remain curious “in a pure way.”
“I was like a kid in a candy store,” says Shimko about her college days. “The environment was music, performing arts, visual arts and everything in between.” As she found her footing as an artist, she worked in restaurants, as a theater set designer, an art instructor and a textile artist.
She and a fellow student developed an art therapy program at Project HOME, and her community service to the Village of Arts and Humanities included using art as a community healing initiative.
She recalls looking at images of live oaks and Spanish moss in the university’s research library and felt a pull. “I’d never been to the Lowcountry, and I’d never been down here—maybe that was a kind of collective unconscious,” she says.
Whether fate or happenstance, Shimko moved to South Carolina in 2000. A serendipitous meeting with a Daufuskie Island artist, who knew the McCullough family in Charleston, led to her first exhibition at the 53 Cannon Street Gallery.
“I found a home on the east side, and I found my tribe,” Shimko recalls. “Though Greenville is home now, I exhibited in Charleston galleries for two decades, and I have fond memories—Charleston is kind of like my mothership.”
Shimko’s experiences are reflected in her work—from her dream logic narrative series to abstracts and commissioned pieces. Her mother, a former nurse with artistic inclinations, introduced her to color theory, replacing her crayons with oil pastels, showing her how to layer and shadow.
Shimko maintains a quest for learning—whether that’s reading the novels of Gabriel García Márquez, visiting multicultural cities or getting back to her roots in rural Americana.
“There’s no right or wrong about my art,” she explains. “Some comes from dreams, others from a lecture or from something I’ve read.” Shimko’s Pennsylvania German lineage and fraktur art, a Pennsylvania German folk art style popular in the mid-1800s and 1900s, influence many of her paintings. The Byzantine era, reflecting predominately religious figures with large eyes and penetrating stares, as well as Marcel Duchamp’s provocative paintings have also been an inspiration for her work.
Shimko goes into what she explains is a “deep, meditative mode” when she paints. Music is part of her process—John Coltrane, John Luther Adams, Schubert, Chopin—each bringing forth a cacophony of color.
“I have slight synesthesia, so when I hear sound, I sometimes see color. Depending on what colors I’m feeling or thinking, it’s in tune with what I want to do, and I work on a lot of different paintings at once,” she reveals.
Shimko’s Water Halo series and her Lowcountry Views series evoke emotion. “It’s like how you feel when you go for a swim or go out on a boat—the water, the landscapes feel like different colors,” she explains.
Her commission pieces run the gamut—representations of special occasions, pet portraits, spirit animals—anything one can imagine can become a custom work of art.
Shimko continues to nourish the curiosity that is such a fundamental part of who she is and shines through in her work. “To be an artist, you have to have some relationship to that child’s self,” she says. “There’s a connective aspect to our human existence when you look at art. I hope people can embrace curiosity—just taking time, every day—to be curious.” *
Brigitte Surette is a freelance writer, editor and copywriter. You can read more of her work at brigittesurette.com.
