Sleuthing Scraps

Lisa Kowalski is an abstract expressionist painter known for her vibrant, sometimes almost violent applications of thick impasto paints. Some of her pieces are purely abstract, others reference the movement of cities and figures, notably this one, "Pretty Little Lies 2", that I just sold to a private equity firm in Boulder:

Where does she get her inspiration? Like many expressionists, some of the brushstrokes come from the muse within within, but as I saw when I visited her RINO studio, she pulls color palettes and compositions from many printed sources. Lisa has a collection of messy, paint splattered, nearly falling apart but lovely artist notebooks with torn, shredded and collaged images. As I sit with her she pages through them swiftly, and I imagine she does the same when she is there on her own, priming to paint, waiting for the right glimpse to guide her next piece.