Lisa Beaman was born and raised in Bradford, MA. She received a B.A. in Art from the University of Massachusetts. She moved to Austin 25 years ago with her husband Joe, a native Texan who is the Chairman of the Mechanical Engineering Dept. at U.T Austin. Lisa and Joe have four children. Lisa worked in the fabric medium for 20 years, establishing herself as one of the leaders in the contempory art quilt movement. Her quilt work was often representational and narrative, incorporating figures and objects to examine emotional ideas. As an artist with many sources of inspiration, she felt a need to change direction in 1998. She began working with oil paint on canvas, and found the medium allowed her to immediately and directly express and apply her ideas. She studied the painterly techniques of the old masters, and employs a personal version of such techniques for an individualist approach to representational art. Lisa’s work is characterized by a bold expression of subject matter, manifest through a rich use of color and tone, which creates texture and depth on the surface of the canvas. She continues to explore all kinds of subject matter including figures, still life, animals and landscapes.