Visual Artist Lisa Porter Lawrence Recently Featured on Close Up Radio

TAOS, NM, UNITED STATES, August 12, 2026 /EINPresswire.com/ -- Thrice in her career, Lisa Porter Lawrence was offered the kind of deal most painters wait a lifetime for. Thrice, she said no.

In the 1970s, working out of a studio in Baltimore, Lawrence was offered gallery shows in Manhattan, including at the Sachs Gallery initiated through painter Babe Shapiro, an artist in The Gallery’s stable, if she would produce a series of photo realistic portraits of famous political figures. The offer came after viewings of a college assignment: a photo real, larger than life painting of an astronaut’s head that she jokingly calls her “howdy doody painting” due to her perceived absurdity in capitalizing on sensationalism. Gallery owners loved it and wanted 15 more. She turned them down. She says the thought of doing that work for money, over and over, felt like she would lose herself in it.

The same offer came again in the 1990s, this time in New Mexico. Her answer was the same. “I don’t want to get known for this,” Lawrence recalls telling galleries.

Instead, Lawrence built her career on portraits, landscapes, painted furniture and murals guided as much by intuition as by technique. She still may still rely upon a grid method to translate photographs onto canvas, a technique she says she later recognized in the writing of painter David Hockney (who documented how masters historically used projection tools of their own). For Lawrence, the detail that brings a portrait to life is almost always the same: the eyes. Clients have told her that seeing a finished portrait of a person they had avoided for years made them reconsider the bruised relationship entirely.

Lawrence’s move west began with what she describes as a series of vivid, unbidden visions, images that played out like aerial footage over unfamiliar landscapes. Those visions eventually led her to New Mexico. A 1981 visit to an overlook above the Rio Grande Gorge near Taos left enough of an impression that she returned to her Baltimore studio and painted a 5 foot by 7 foot oil titled “Chimera (no comma) Spirit Guardians of the Gorge,” based entirely on memory of landscape and energy. A year later, she left the East Coast for good, settling first in Santa Fe. After four decades in northern New Mexico, she moved to Taos in 2023.

That same instinct now drives Lawrence’s donation funded Gifting Art Program, which is designed to place her paintings and murals inside homeless shelters and community centers across northern New Mexico, free of charge. The program grew out of her time volunteering at a shelter in Las Vegas, New Mexico, where she spent a year and a half choosing wall colors and installing nature inspired murals.

At first, the shelter staff there warned her. People in crisis, she was told, might carve their initials into original artwork or damage it outright. Lawrence installed the murals anyway. Staff later informed her that, during a difficult stretch when the shelter was between directors, residents punched holes in walls and damaged furniture and fixtures throughout the building. Staff later told her that yet not one piece of her artwork was touched.

For Lawrence, that outcome speaks to something beyond decoration. She explains that people staying in shelters are navigating a level of instability and loss of control that most visitors to an art gallery never experience, and that a room stripped of any reminder of beauty or calm reinforces those negative feelings. “Nature, she explains, “carries no argument, no judgment and no history with the person looking at it. It offers a sense of steadiness that a person in crisis can accept on their own terms.” Choosing colors and scenes for a shared space, she says, is also a way of telling people who live there that the room, and by extension their surroundings and they themselves, are considered worth the effort.

Lawrence continues that offering through her Gifting Art Program to donate paintings and painted walls to outreach centers that want them but cannot afford them. Her underlying philosophy is “that a person’s surroundings shape mood, focus and a sense of agency.” This philosophy is outlined in her book, “Art and You: Art for your Mindset.”

Lawrence is expanding her commissioned work beyond New Mexico, accepting portraits of people, pets and places through photographs (usually as emailed JPEGs) sent to her by clients, along with custom furniture and mixed media pieces incorporating materials such as wood, papier-mâché and dried grasses. She is beginning a second career in hypnosis, an extension, she says, of the same interest in how imagery and suggestion shape the subconscious mind.

Clients commissioning her work can expect regular progress photos and a collaborative process from start to finish. “They can expect an adventure,” she shares. “And it will be an adventure.”

About Lisa Porter Lawrence, LLC

Lisa Porter Lawrence, LLC is the studio of artist Lisa Porter Lawrence, based in Taos, New Mexico. Lawrence works across paintings, drawings, murals, painted furniture and mixed media, accepting commissions for portraits, landscapes and custom pieces for private clients. Her donor funded Gifting Art Program offers donations of original artwork and painted murals to homeless shelters and community outreach centers to support the dignity and well-being of the people who use those spaces. Lawrence is the author of “Art and You: Art for Your Mindset,” available on Amazon. Her gallery and studio in Taos are open by appointment.

Close Up Radio featured Lisa Porter Lawrence, Visual Artist, Art Consultant, Entrepreneur, Author, in an interview with Doug Llewelyn on Monday August 10th at 12pm Eastern

Listen to the Podcast
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/close-up-radio-spotlights-visual-artist-lisa-porter/id1785721253?i=1000782884587
https://www.iheart.com/podcast/269-close-up-radio-242020413/episode/close-up-radio-spotlights-visual-artist-lisa-porter-lawrence-340928736
https://open.spotify.com/episode/56ZHTuK0pyV8wRe31wXJmX

For more information about Lisa Porter Lawrence, please visit https://lisaporterlawrencellc.com/

Lou Ceparano
Close Up Television & Radio
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