IN A BIG, NEW PICTURE, THE FLORIDA-BASED ARTIST TAKES A TURN TOWARD FUNK-INSPIRED ABSTRACTION
Published on April 5, 2026
by Edward M. Gómez
We first met the artist Lisa Remeny, who lives and works in Coconut Grove, a lush coastal district of Miami, south of that sprawling city’s central zones, in brutjournal’s October 2021 issue. At that time, we took a close look at the work of a number of artists, including Remeny, for whom drawing plays a big, fundamental role in all of their art-making.
Remeny studied at the California College of Arts and Crafts (now the California College of the Arts) in Oakland, where she focused on filmmaking, photography, and printmaking; later she moved into oil painting, essentially teaching herself its techniques. In 2021, the artist told brutjournal, “I began making drawings as far back as I can remember. As a child, often I became so involved in my creative process that a capital punishment for wrongdoing was to have my crayons taken away from me!”
At that time, she told us, “My maternal grandmother, an artist, was one of my earliest art coaches. Later, in high school, my art instructor introduced us to blind contour drawing. Ever since then, I’ve continued employing it as a stylistic method in my mixed-media works on paper, whose images, on occasion, I’ve interpreted and transferred to canvas. Sometimes, when I begin a new painting, I draw in a hyperrealist way on the canvas, referring to source photographs I’ve shot myself. That’s another kind of drawing altogether.”
We asked Remeny to think back to when, as a young girl, she began discovering her interest in art, and later, when she began studying art history and art-making in school. Was it through her encounters with paintings in books, galleries, and museums that she became drawn to painted images of nature — and to images of plants, in particular?
She recalled, “I was born and brought up in tropical Miami, and was always drawn to the nature that surrounds us here, particularly the skies. Art history lessons began at a very young age, with my grandmother showing me the works of the artists she admired; Maxfield Parrish, Paul Gauguin, and others. I don’t remember having visited a museum until much later, when I lived in the San Francisco Bay Area, where I attended art school. I’ve always loved the works of Georgia O’Keefe, particularly her series of Hawaii paintings, which she made in 1939, and David Hockney, in addition to those of the artists my grandmother turned me on to.”
To make her paintings and watercolors on paper, Remeny often works from photographs she shoots herself, including in the broader Caribbean region, which she knows well. (In the 1980s, she lived and worked in Jamaica and, over the years, she has maintained close ties to that island country’s arts community.)
She explained, “I almost always use my own photos when creating my oil paintings on canvas. Sometimes, I’m commissioned to produce a painting with a special subject for a particular collector, using a photo or an outtake from a video that person might have shot while traveling to some far-flung locale. To create larger-scaled works, I refer to semi-abstract mixed media works on paper that I make myself, translating them in the form of paintings onto canvas.”
In paintings like “Bee’s Eye View” (2009, oil on canvas), Remeny interprets her subject — a deep close-up of the head of a sunflower — with a hint of the exuberance of what might be called “Tropical Pop.” By contrast, in a close investigation of a single flower, like the painter’s “Sacred White Lotus” (2023, oil on canvas), she strikes an eloquent note of wonder and veneration.
We were interested, in particular, in one of Remeny’s most recent paintings, “Boom Shakalaka” (2025, oil on canvas), which shows a single plant leaf set against a background of explosive color; it’s filled with references to vegetation and takes the artist’s work in an unexpectedly abstract direction. What was the impulse that moved her to produce this painting?
About this picture, whose title is a play on a lyric from a song by Sly and the Family Stone (“I Want to Take You Higher”), which the influential soul-funk band famously performed at the Woodstock festival in August 1969, Remeny said, “I first made a photograph of its subject in 2016 and later used a filter on my iPhone to create the reference material from which I painted it during the summer of 2025. It depicts a lily pad that I spotted in a nearby garden. In a picture like this one, I love how the macro close-up of a subject becomes an abstraction, which can become no more or less challenging to paint than, say, a more comprehensive landscape or some other, more realistic composition — and I absolutely love this kind of challenge!”
Remeny added, “I had been holding onto the photo-image on which this painting is based for many years and had marked it as a ‘must do,’ but the truth is that, for a long time, I didn’t have the courage to tackle it.”
We asked the artist to wax a bit philosophical about her work; in particular, we wanted to find out if, for Remeny, as a painter who has long studied and focused on portraying a certain part of the natural world, there might be something special, in these soul-crushing times, that vivid images of nature can convey?
She told us, “My wish, in expressing myself through what I hope may be regarded as beautiful images, is that my work might help bring a sense of hope, light, and positivity to viewers’ hearts and minds.”
Below: In recent years, Remeny has also begun taking a somewhat abstract approach to some of her seascapes, one of the artist’s favorite kinds of image. Seen here: “Blue Monday,” 2022, oil on canvas, 48 x 48 inches (121.92 x 121.92 centimeters), private collection. Photo courtesy of the artist
