Lisa Avila

Turning Life into Art After a horse industry career in Texas, spanning 30+ years, I found myself making a huge career shift when I became Performing Arts Director of a local gallery/cultural center. Additional part-time employment as an assistant to the gallery director led me to begin painting again and to apply for the Director’s job when she left the gallery. Voila! A new world became my focus. Though I was an art major in college, it had been years since I had drawn or painted, and I was suddenly inspired and energized to create by the many artists who were part of the gallery where I worked. When my husband and I retired to Placitas during the pandemic, I finally had more time to paint, and the landscape and beauty of my new environs continue to astound and amaze me. I work almost exclusively in acrylics and dabble with non-representational abstracts. However, I would call my primary focus “representational” – whether abstracted or less so. Different subjects lead me down a variety of roads when it comes to style. My non-representational pieces generally reflect a mood or are a response to an occurrence in my life or the world and my representational work is often inspired by nature. As a child, I could not stop drawing horses (even in school,) and the wild horses of Placitas often appear in my work. I try to capture not only their beauty but their lives as herd animals. The 30 years I spent training, showing and breeding horses certainly helped lead me here – from the lush green of my childhood in the east to the arid pastures of North Texas to retirement in the high desert sun. The journey has been wonderful and I am truly blessed.