Visual Conversations


Lisa Pressman & Susan Stover

October 1 – November 14, 2021

In this exhibition, artists, Susan Stover & Lisa Pressman present their unique styles of mixed media, encaustic, and cold wax artwork in a “Visual Conversation.”

Together in the TCA Master Gallery they explore the idea of a visual conversation. Even though they work very differently and live on opposite sides of the U.S., they want to respond to each other’s work with an answer in their own work, a call and response, or a pairing of couples and groupings of works that seem to belong together to tell an abstract narrative. Using a variety of materials and approaches along with post-pandemic zoom communication, they are looking forward to sharing and responding to visual cues from each other’s work.

Susan’s paintings and sculptures often recall an ethnic sensibility and geometric organization. She is interested in the objects made by non-Western cultures and how they are tied to identity, status, religious beliefs, and mythologies. Adapting processes that are traditionally used in the production of textiles, she uses materials and techniques that refer to a collective history with the completed painting and forms revealing themselves in the making.

Lisa’s career as an artist has been marked by exploring the expressive potential of a variety of mediums, among them oil, encaustic, cold wax, and mixed-media. Her work is abstract, conceptually based, and process-driven, featuring marks, forms, colors, and patterns that are evocative rather than descriptive. While Lisa is known for her encaustic work and her oil paintings, she combines various mediums to achieve her distinctive surfaces.

Susan and Lisa talk almost every day. They have been collaborating for over a year on various online workshops and in c2c-art.com, a teaching website and membership community. Most of their classes together focus on a sensitivity to materials and exploration of concepts. Some of the themes that they challenge students with are contemplative practices, sense of place, memory, time and art as artifact. Although their art is very different, their connection to process and concept brings them together and these ideas resonate in both of their work.

Susan Stover

Susan Stover is a San Francisco Bay Area artist who creates paintings and sculptures that explore themes of cultural identity and mythology. Her work often combines traditional textile techniques such as basketry, stitching, batik, and indigo dyeing with encaustic and other paint mediums. With the study of ethnic patterns and of utilitarian and sacred objects in non-western cultures, her work embraces ritual, tradition, and meditation through repetitive labor.

Susan received a MFA from California College of Art in Oakland, California and a BFA from Miami University in Oxford, Ohio.  She has taught extensively including on the faculty at University of California-Davis, and has taught workshops in Australia, India, Italy, Mexico and throughout the U.S. Her paintings are in private and corporate collections. She is represented by Carrie Haddad Gallery in Hudson, NY and Seager Gray Gallery in Mill Valley, CA.

Lisa Pressman

Lisa Pressman is an American abstract painter whose work encompasses the transcendent conditions of passion and spontaneity. Her tactile surfaces speak of emotion in physical form and insist in a sense of imperfection and unquenchable humanness. Known as a master colorist, her paintings reveal a depth of intuition and mystery that suggest an existential consciousness.

A native of New Jersey, Lisa received her BA from Douglass College Rutgers University in ceramics and her MFA from Bard College in painting. She has been exhibiting in solo and group exhibitions since 1981 and her work is in numerous private and public collections. She is represented by Susan Eley Fine Arts in New York, Addington Gallery in Chicago, and The Gallery of Fine Arts in Telluride.  She recently curated and juried two shows, one at Monmouth University,NJ  and the other at the Painting Center in NY.

Lisa is a highly respected instructor who maintains a vigorous teaching schedule throughout the U.S. and internationally. She offers mentoring, portfolio review, and private workshops with her teaching focused on cultivating the visual voice of each student.