Lisa Macchi took twenty-five years off from art, but now she’s painting Charlottesville red.
Sitting in her McGuffey Art Center studio, radiating an energy that belies her eighty years, Lisa Macchi has some advice for young artists stressing over how to start a painting. “You have to break the silence,” she says. “The first thing I do is just get paint on the canvas. I put it there and see if it makes sense. It doesn’t even have to relate to how the painting ends up.”
Macchi herself never quite knows how a painting will end up. The result appears to bubble up from her subconscious. Yet her spontaneous approach fairly shouts abstract expressionism and its sub-genre, action painting: the paint seems to fly around the canvas, as if to bust past its edges, a feeling amplified with Sharpie scribbles and scratches made with both a palette knife and her fingernails. Macchi calls this “disrupting the paint.”
All that action happens in canvases that are often orders of magnitude smaller than your typical abstract expressionist painting— rarely larger than 18 x 24 inches and sometimes as small as a few inches square. Two of Macchi’s supersized art heroes are Joan Mitchell and Willem de Kooning, but unlike Mitchell her approach isn’t really nonobjective, and unlike de Kooning her paintings don’t default to the human form. They evoke landscapes, with a sense of depth that takes a moment to register then comes as a surprise given how dense their surfaces are. “There’s always a horizon line,” she says. “It kind of creeps up on me, much as I try to avoid it.”
Jackson Pollock might have scorned any such reference to reality, but Macchi has benefited from sympathetic teaching by less obstinate artists. After getting her painting BFA at Philadelphia’s Tyler School of Art, she went on to New York’s illustrious Art Students League, where her modernist teachers imparted a sense of shape (Knox Martin) and a feeling for the plasticity of paint (Peter Golfinopoulos). Scholarships took her to the historic Provincetown Workshop on Cape Cod, where she studied with painters Victor Candell and Leo Manso.
“One of collage’s masters,” per the pivotal abstract expressionist Robert Motherwell, Manso often subsumed his collage elements into the paint itself, applying color directly over and around them. Macchi’s work owes a debt to him. It’s full of scraps of paper and other two-dimensional materials, even glued-on chunks of dried paint from her palette, embedded within its surfaces. Her collage elements don’t just enliven the painting’s surface; they also influence how she paints around them.
In one canvas that suggests a cantilevered bridge, Macchi used a marker to extend the lines of magazine-scrap ladders through the horizon into the sky-blue of the painting’s upper half, making them part of the bridge’s superstructure. She is currently ripping up a set of cursive letters from the 1940s that a friend donated to the cause. “I never cut, I only tear,” she boasts. Her use of such materials is not in the mode of artists such as Dadaist Kurt Schwitters, whose two-dimensional work is often dominated by collaged elements. “They shouldn’t read as an isolated thing,” she says. “I want people to go up to the painting and take a closer look.” Yet stepping back again makes you realize how integral collage is to the paint, and the painting.
What’s surprising, given Macchi’s easy confidence, is that she took a twenty-five-year midlife break from painting. Back in the 1960s, she says, “I did what was expected of me. I got married and taught art to grade schoolers.” That career lasted all of five years. “I was terrible. I loved the kids but hated teaching.” Macchi got divorced, moved into a midtown Manhattan loft, and committed herself to making art. “I got some traction in New York,” she recalls. “But Leo [Manso] and Victor [Candell] had told me that if you can find half a dozen people in your lifetime who really appreciate and understand your work, you should consider yourself lucky. And I thought, I can’t live that way, not so much economically but emotionally. I didn’t think it should be easy but I didn’t want it to be that hard.”
With that realization, Macchi soon stopped painting and moved across the George Washington Bridge to New Jersey, where she became a businesswoman. Among other tasks she handled sales and marketing for a real estate developer. “My bosses were crazy,” she says, “but I knew how to manage them, so I actually enjoyed it.” It may have helped that Macchi led a mitigating dual existence as a horsewoman. Her lifelong equestrian pursuits have ranged from classical dressage (still doing it) to years of barrel racing on the rodeo circuit (never broke a bone), with some steeplechase thrown in. She still rides.
Macchi’s long hiatus from painting might have continued if her second husband, a businessman-turned-yogi, hadn’t been diagnosed with cancer. Before his treatment began, the couple picked up and spent a month and a half in a Nicaraguan expat community where they had once vacationed. “I asked myself, ‘What am I gonna do there?’” Macchi says. “So we brought along paint, canvas, and stretchers, and I set up a studio in a storefront in the seaside town of San Juan del Sur.” Nicaragua made Macchi realize how much she missed painting, and when the couple returned to New Jersey she kept at it and found a gallery that successfully represented her work.
A decade ago Macchi decided it was high time to retire, from the business world anyway. On the encouragement of her daughter, who lives in Richmond, she and her husband bought a house in Palmyra, half an hour east of Charlottesville. She has been painting nonstop ever since, undeterred even by her husband’s death. “I miss him every day,” she says, “but I decided I wasn’t going to let catastrophe define me.’
Macchi doesn’t paint at home, and comes in to McGuffey only three days a week. “Otherwise I’d have too many paintings,” she says. “I paint fast.” (Ever in need of canvases, she’s currently painting over a McGuffey colleague’s unwanted paintings.) Is working fast a dangerous thing for an artist? “You may end up with crap,” she avers, “but you’ve gotta make bad paintings in order to make good ones. If I labor over a painting it gets heavy and tired and doesn’t have the freshness I want.” In fact Macchi thinks one of the hardest things about art is knowing when to stop, whatever your medium or genre. “A little voice tells me, ‘Step away from the painting,’” she quips. “On the other hand, sometimes I’ll sneak into the hallway at McGuffey and work a little more on a painting that’s already hanging in a show.”
One of Macchi’s roles at McGuffey in the past few years has been co-chair of the gallery committee, curating and mounting monthly exhibitions with Charlottesville painter Mike Powers. She took on that work with the same commitment and vision as her painting, according to Powers. “Lisa’s curatorial approach is always thoughtful and on point,” he says. “And though the way she paints may seem zany, she has an aesthetic roadmap as strong as any I’ve ever encountered. She’s a trip.” Friend and McGuffey artist Steve Haske seconds Powers. “I’m always amazed at the immediacy of Lisa’s paintings,” he says. “They have a wonderful tactile quality that for me evokes something much deeper, and their gestures and colors match her bold personality.”
Ever confident, Macchi even gave up a recent exhibition slot in McGuffey’s main gallery, an opportunity few artists would miss. “I don’t need that kind of pressure,” she says, though she has enough new paintings to fill the gallery two times over. “It’s about the journey.” So why McGuffey, when she could simply paint at home? “It’s the perfect environment for me,” she effuses. “There’s a synergy to the place, with everyone feeding off each other’s work. All you have to do is walk down the hall to see something that resonates with you. I’ve found my best work happens when I’m surrounded by other artists.”
What would she tell people who want to start painting, or, like her, return to their art after years away? How to break that silence and get meaningful paint on the canvas? “I offer them a trick,” she explains. “Set up three small canvases in a row, and work on all of them at the same time. And respond to each of them as it’s happening. Don’t plan them in advance, and don’t over-intellectualize them. One way or another, you have to leave your self-criticism in the drawer.”
Russell Hart’s artwork has been widely exhibited at galleries and museums that include the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the Newport Art Museum, the Addison Gallery of American Art, and the DeCordova Museum. Hart has taught photography at Tufts University and the Boston Museum School, and currently teaches in the Master’s in Digital Photography program at New York’s School of Visual Arts.
He was for many years Executive Editor of American Photo magazine and was a member of the American Photo editorial team that won the American Society of Magazine Editors’ 1994 National Magazine Award for General Excellence. He also received the 2003 Gold Medal for Best General Feature from the International Regional Magazine Association, and in 2009 won the Griffin Museum of Photography’s Susan Sontag Scribe Award for best photographic writing. Hart is co-author of the Pearson/Prentice-Hall college textbook Photography, as well as author of Photography For Dummies, among several other books. His writing and artwork have appeared in many publications, including The New York Times, Harper’s, The Boston Globe Magazine, Men’s Journal, Fotografare, and Us magazine.
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