Shows
Artists on the Bluff Summer Arts Festival, Lake Bluff, IL, 6/16-17
Mélange Gallery, March of Robots Telluride, CO, 3/14
Art of Robot, i.d.e.a Museum, Mesa, Arizona - 02/14 -05/14
Art of Robot, Appleton Museum of Art, Oscala, FL 6/13- 9/13
Lakeview East Festival of the Arts, Chicago, IL 08/09
Noyes Cultural Arts Center, Evanston,IL 08/09 Group Show
"Florence Singer: 60 Years of Inspiration" Co-curated by Lisa Grothman Ryan & Karen Valiquette Basely
The Bottle Shop, Wilmette, IL 04/08, Solo Show
The Noodle Café, Wilmette, IL 7/08, Solo Show
Pick-A-Cup Café, Evanston, IL 10/08, Group Sh
The Learning & Product Expo: Art in Chicago(Group Show), 7/09
Bio
Artist Lisa Grothman Ryan graduated from Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design (MIAD) in 1993 with a bachelor’s degree in Fine Art and Major in Illustration. Soon after, she moved to New York City and began a career as a freelance illustrator. Her illustrations appeared in business, trade, medical and sports publications (Fortune, Folio, US Banker, Forbes, Quality Progress, Tennis Magazine and many others). During that time, she started to focus more attention on creating fine art and completed a number of commissioned pieces.
In 1998, she moved back to the Midwest to the Chicago area. After she arrived, she focused primarily on fine art and created her first website and sold prints and cards reproduced from her original pastel paintings while continuing to sell privately commissioned work. After having two children, she became concerned about the dust and spray fix associated with pastels. She switched her primary medium to water soluble oils. She discovered that water soluble oils have the same depth of color and work like conventional oil paints without the need to use hazardous solvents to thin and clean.
After switching to oils, Lisa worked on two series, The Intimate Lives of Fruit and Vegetables and Robots. Lisa continuted with the robot theme working with etching on copper plate and woodcut prints. She is currently working on a smaller size series of paintings, oil on canvas, with the theme being "love of color".
The theme of Lisa’s artwork typically revolves around the personification of still life objects. She takes all of her own reference photos. She incorporates humor and hints of relationships in her paintings of inanimate objects.
In 2019, she launched her Photo Canvases Gallery. Over the years, Lisa has relished in taking photographs every where she goes. She has dragged her 35mm digital camera on trips to Ireland, Costa Rica, England, California, Arizona, Washington, Colorado, Wisconsin and just around her home in Illinois. She has put some of her favorite photographs into collections and had them printed on canvas to create lightweight, easy to hang, beautiful images to fill large and small spaces at work or at home.