About Lisa Blanco

My name is Lisa Blanco. I am a portrait and figure painter in the North Georgia area. My inspiration for painting comes from an entire childhood of watching my own father pursue and establish a professional career as a landscape painter. My whole world was surrounded by art; paint thinner was the smell of my childhood, the swish and tap of the paintbrush was a familiar background noise, and I couldn’t hold my dad’s hand without first noticing the ultramarine blue smeared somewhere across a finger or two. I never thought I would paint like my dad, but I always wanted to draw like him. I could think of anything and he would draw it for me, and somehow he would produce quality sketches of witches with giant warts on their noses, or old men with exaggerated features and funny stances. It was these times with my dad that I began to see drawing people as the most interesting. There was a real uniqueness to human faces and how they are created and structured and I wanted to get better at it. I kept up with drawing my whole childhood. After I got married, and had a busload of children, I began sketching them here and there and my husband encouraged me to paint and believed I had a gifting that could be developed. If I could explain why I choose to paint the way I do and why I chose figures, it would be that there is a design in humans that is patterned after the image of God, that though we see him in nature ( I hear you landscape painters, I know), we see his work uniquely in the human who is made to know him. And there is something about handing a client a painting of someone they cherish and mirroring the emotions and love that ultimately comes from their Creator.