Re visit from 2008 "What are my Goals as an Artist"

This is such a serendipitous question as I graduated on Saturday with my M.F.A. (yes!) and I need to focus on what is the next step and what does that look like.

On my pragmatic page it looks like my need to create a list of goals of what I need to accomplish to “make it” in the art world. I need to put on my business hat and create a website, a marketing strategy, apply to shows and galleries with proper documentation. I have to update my business cards. I have to search for opportunities and it goes on and on. My goals need to be carefully mapped out for me to make it all happen. It is a high-risk business and my product is my art and my grand vision.

My ultimate goal is to be self-sustaining artist creating, selling my work and teaching art. I also want to open a healing arts studio, which I call the Green House Studios. This would be a community space for new paradigm artists and thinkers to build alternative systems in various communities. Ideally it would create an all-inclusive dialogue about art and its ability to empower. This would include art workshops, gallery space, and community outreach art programs. Lauren and I speak about this Blog as the virtual beginnings of such a studio.

For me equally mystifying is my passion for what I am doing.
Pragmatism seems to fly out the window as I create the work that I need to do. I became very comfortable just being a conduit and having creativity flow through me. I have come to believe that I am merely a channel for something greater than me that manifests through my art. As the artist Paul Klee wrote, “the artist does nothing other than gather and pass on what comes to him from the depths. He neither serves nor rules ---- He transmits…. he is merely a channel.”
My personal quest is to reunite art and the spirit. Akin to the alchemist’s work, which is the transformation of gross material into spiritual substance, I see my art as artifacts of my ever-transforming consciousness. My art and its process represent a humble quest to resurrect divination in my personal journey and into the community at large. As an artist my work gives the viewer a personal glimpse of my internal revelations.I speak of divination in its broadest sense, meaning that through my art and process I find myself in a continuum of discovering the unknown within myself and in the world that I live in. The motives and impulses behind my creative process are my shamanistic belief that through the process of creation, I align with dynamism and the divinity that is animated in all life.
Another goal of my work is revelation. I believe the core social issue that I am exploring in my painting, photography, site-specific works, and my teaching is abuse, which plagues society and the planet Earth. My approach to this work is not criticism, but a gentle revelation of what was and what can be. In all my work I explore and reveal the shadow of humanity by facing it, bringing it to surface, and on a personal level, finding a way to transform it.

To surmise, essentially my goal as an artist is the marriage of the paradox between pragmatism and pure creativity. As well as my service to the world at large. On an interpersonal level one could say that my art is my Yoga, the discipline that promotes the unity within myself. Carl Jung called this individuation.
I apologize for this got a little wordy.
Namaste, Lisa
I am interested in hearing what are your goals as an artist? And how do you keep one foot in each world to make Art your life and profession?

MOCA: Art in the Streets

On April 23, 2011 I went to go see the exhibition at MOCA: Art in the Streets in Little Tokyo in Los Angeles. I was really excited to see the exhibition. It had been getting a lot of press from The New York Times and the Huffington Post. It seemed it brewed up the age old controversy and debate of folks perceptions on what is ART and what is not ART.

As we approached MOCA the lines of people waiting to get in was off the hook. We decided to go to lunch and check out the other ART that was being created on the streets. Here is what we saw outside the doors of the museum.

The coolest thing was Little Tokyo was a mad house of people. The Sushi houses and stores were filled to the brim with folks either waiting to see the exhibition or who had just finished. Studies have shown that at art events individual people spend around $27 each. And who said Arts bring nothing to our economy? I think that was the Republicans.

JR'S eyes. I thought graphiti artists did not tag over others art? Maybe it was collaboration.

JR's great talk on Ted, I was happy to see an artist win this award.

I felt this key was placed there on purpose. What does it mean? Art?

Space Invader...

A man checking out the art.

Next I will go into the exhibition inside closed doors of museum.

Art Review from Cynthia Hanson

That is how I feel when I am visiting her studio with her paintings piled up or hanging from the walls all around us. I feel that her paintings are showing me both personal and universal truths. They are about Lisa, of course, but also about myself connecting to that which is dark and deeply within, or that which is light- arising and emerging to engage with in sacred conversation.


I view Lisa as a kind of artist/ archaeologist: using painting as a tool for expression, but in a manner that embodies self-discovery and excavation of connections that yield both personal and universal truths. There is also a strong element of healing in her work, not only for herself but for the Earth. "I see the sprit of the Earth as being continuously tortured, destroyed, and ostracized from civilization," Lisa says."I empathize with her pain and her victimization, but I also marvel at her power, strength, and spiritual resilience. I drawn upon my link with the earth and infuse my paintings with life force to activate the human/ divine connection to help create balance within our collective consciousness," She speaks of the earth as the "Ultimate Artist."I feel that by integrating the divinity of the natural world into my fear of our modern world," she goes on to say, "I will heal-thus equalizing myself and then the world."
Cynthia Hanson

Art Review by JJ Levine

WiThin Places
JJ Levine

Sitting unassumingly at a crossroads like a seeker awaiting their next life path, the
artist watches the art exhibit unfold. Patrons arrive, some familiar with the territory being
presented, some just to immerse themselves in the creative atmosphere they love so

much. The space held together by the works of MFA graduate student, Lisa Rasmussen.
Her paintings, photographs and installations on display this evening straddle the realms
of inspiration, inner sight, and cross cultural phenomenon.

With healing light as the chosen medium, the artist openly invites anyone brave or
willing enough to trek mountain ranges of the psyche, whether that is perceived as
personal or collective. Voyagers around the room are spotted preparing to depart on
guided expeditions with individually assigned sherpas of the light, inter-dimensional,
spirit guides, wielding paint while walking between the worlds. Operating in the neo-
shamanistic world of creativity as ritual, Ms Rasmussen assigns art materials to their
appropriate posts. Lines, stains and fields come alive with pigmented intention, making

. l .

the p~rceiver's reality feel like the rug just got pulled out from underneath them.

\

Lisa's ~acred intentions are painted multi-dimensionally, making marks on canvases with
ancient symbols, and then layering over with an image that the viewer finally sees. The
'presence of the Earth Mother herself is felt sweeping to and fro on a ground of pre-
meditated archaic ecstasy'; an intersection between Spirituality, Divinity and the space-
time continuum. Her artworks, whenfeeling into them like portals, open up like
windows into alternate possibilities. While standing in front of one of Lisa's paintings, I
fell into it, falling into a wormhole showing another time and space. I saw a tunnel with a
bear's sleeping space similar to one I had seen while recently visiting Aillwee Cave in
Ireland. Upon returning to present reality, I could feel that my vision and the painting
were connected somehow, through the energetics of place and time. Some would say that
that space holds a frequency that is both emotionally and spiritually familiar.

However, be weary, young travelers, for there is a dark side to the Thin Places that we' are
shown, that may not be otherwise realized. Another side privy to the naive, the
courageous, the initiated, or even the uninitiated is that of the darkness of man's ascent
away from nature. Viewers intending to spend "Sunday afternoon in the park'", are
instead confronted with reflections of the black waters of their earthly existence..

•

Lisa Rasmussen has that angle covered as well; with artist's integrity, and angel's
guidance, she skillfully breathes life into the void. Taking the mirrors handed to
unsuspecting purveyors, the artist smashes them with subconscious, yet idyllic, imagery.
The artist personally guides the viewer into her private life of meditative memories,
artistic discipline and spiritual discovery.

1 Mircea Eliade, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy. 1964; reprint, Princeton,
N1:Princeton University Press, 2004. ISBN 0-691-1.1942-2

2 http://en.wikipedia.orglwiki/Sunday_in_the_Park _with_George