Once Lisa Tureson decided to leave her career in the insurance industry, there was no stopping her from exploring and learning about the many techniques, materials and tools artists use to express themselves. Actually, she probably always did have a curious and exploratory bent. At age four Lisa often watched her artist-teacher mother at the easel. Thusly inspired, her first murals were created out of her mother’s lip stick on her sisters’ bedroom walls. Whether she was chastised for her use of the lipstick medium or praised for her ambitious wall-size art expression, this “project” proved a precursor to the large paintings in her present day solo exhibit Scribbles: An Urban Art Expression at Touchstone Gallery during March 2017.

As I write this essay, I’ve got one eye on the keyboard and the other on the sunset. Glowing peach and gray clouds streak across an aqua sky. It’s the kind of color phenomenon that penetrates Cynthia Young’s eye and then transfers to canvas when she starts a painting. She begins by positioning her canvases on the floor, then pouring oil paint thinned with turpentine on to them. She watches the colors percolate and swirl around each other forming shapes. After the paint dries, the canvas goes up on the wall where she paints with a brush to finish up the composition. While observing her surroundings Cynthia learned intuitively to “see forms instead of objects.” She sees color patterns instead of tree canopies, and meditates on colors in the dark shapes forming storm clouds.