About the Artist
Lisa Agosti was born and raised in New York. She apprenticed at the Huntington School of Fine Arts in Long Island where she received formal art training in painting, drawing and sculpture. This forms the basis for her work. She continued her art education at New York University in Manhattan, where she earned her BFA in Art and Aesthetics from the Gallatin School of Individualized study. Her work at NYU included a thesis exploring Arthood and Aesthetics; she graduated cum laude in 1999. While residing in St. Petersburg, Florida, she worked as a teaching artist with Youth Arts Corps, a non-profit organization that serves under-privileged youth, VSA Arts, which brings art to people with disabilities, and the Tampa Museum of Art through the ArtSpace program. Now based in Huntington, New York, she continues working as a fine artist and muralist.
Lisa works in both oil and acrylic paints. Although representational, her work tends towards the abstract at times because of her use of expressive line and distillation of color and form. She calls attention to the painting surface by varying mediums and texture with built up layers of paint and pure pigment powder. In her work, she addresses the complexity of human emotions, exploring this theme through the human figure and the portrait. Her latest work explores the natural beauty of the Florida landscape; banyan trees and old oaks are juxtaposed with figures. The paintings are about people, their individual histories and how it takes physical shape. Her work explores the beauty of nature and the frailty of existence, emotions, tension, the individuality and universality of humanity. We are at the same time unique yet part of a greater whole of humanity and the universe, each one of us bearing the weight of our selves and at the same time shaping the universe and falling within the patterns thereof. The Banyan tree becomes a metaphor for the ever-evolving inner self, which weaves and threads through the paths of others, creating, from one source, an entire community, or forest. The network of roots and branches combine to create a visceral, tangled web of intertwining vessels.
