Immersion Field Series by Lisa Littell
- Jun 15
- 3 min read
A painting is no longer something you look at, but something you witness. That understanding changed everything. I paint what I feel when the world goes quiet enough for the Light to come through.
The Immersion Field Series began not with a canvas, but with a shift in understanding. Fourteen months ago I made a decision to completely change my life - my consciousness, my relationship to my work, my relationship to myself.
What emerged from that process was a realization that stopped me: my art has nothing to do with the art. I could paint on a rock. I could glue a stick to a wall. What I am actually doing - what I have always been doing - is working with energy. Color is the language I speak it in. Not because I have a favorite color, but because I have always thought in combinations - the relationship between colors, the way they move against each other, the feeling that emerges when they meet. The painting is simply where that energy becomes visible.
Each piece in the series is created as an environment rather than an image. The work often carries the essence of landscapes and destinations - not as literal representations, but as felt impressions of place translated through color, movement, and form. What emerges is not a depiction of where you’ve been, but a sensation of being there.
My approach is rooted in the idea that we experience color physically, not just visually. There is a moment when standing in front of one of these paintings where thought quiets and something else takes over. That moment is the foundation of this work. The goal is not to direct the viewer, but to create a field where their own internal response can surface.
The process itself is immersive. Each painting is built through layers of movement, gesture, and time. There is no fixed starting point and no predetermined outcome. The work evolves through continual response - color to color, mark to mark, moment to moment. Some layers are bold and immediate. Others are subtle, almost hidden beneath the surface. Together they create a depth that is both visual and emotional.
The influence of place enters through experience rather than observation. A horizon, a shift in light, the density of air, the feeling of heat or openness - these elements are absorbed, carried, and translated. They are not painted as they are seen, but as they are remembered and felt. In this way the work moves between abstraction and landscape, existing in a space where both can be true at once.
Scale plays an important role. The paintings are often created large so that they shift from object to environment. When the work extends beyond a contained visual frame, it changes the way the body relates to it. You are no longer observing from a distance. You are within it.
This is where the series lives - in the space between viewer and painting, where perception becomes participation. The work invites stillness, but also movement - of the eye, of the body, of attention. Color, texture, and movement are universal. They allow for an immediate relationship with the work, one that is felt before it is understood.
The Immersion Field Series is, at its core, about presence.
About creating a space where people can pause, even briefly, and experience something shifting within themselves. The work does not define that experience. It holds it.
Not to show a place. But to create the feeling of one being witnessed.
