biography

Lisa Bartoletti is a Hawai‘i-based multidisciplinary visual artist whose work is deeply informed by place and femininity. Raised in Southern California and shaped by decades living on the SE Coast of the Big Island, her practice explores feminine form and gesture, through free expressive mark-making and image-based experimentation. The volcanic island and its’ elements of creation and destruction inform her work. The untouched wild places on the edge of the Pacific, in which she resides conveys a theme of creationism that is both timeless and life-affirming. 

Bartoletti received recognition and distinction in art from grade school through university. An alternative school program during her freshman year of high school allowed her to take three art courses consecutively in a single semester, accelerating her development and commitment to visual language. Early works from this period—now lost to time—include ceramic plates and lamp bases created in 1976, onto which she etched women in profile for her teacher’s forms, works that entered private hands.

Her colors are intuitive, her work process-driven, prioritizing the physicality of the mark and the sensation of depth. Soft shadowing, organic movement, and intentional imperfection are central to her visual language. Her images often hover between figuration and abstraction, drawing from modernist themes.

artist resume

• Raised in Southern California

• Hawaii-based

• Inspiration ~ women in their power and in their repose,. Ancient and modern imagery, nature

• BA Psychology, research focus. Jungian dream work, human/cetacean studies.

• Studied fine arts at Instituto Allende, San Miguel de Allende, Mexico

• Assisted by Maestro Gabriel Guerrero Sanchez, Mexico

• Several works in private collections

  artist statement

  I was raised in Thousand Oaks, California, in a classic mid-century Eichler home—an environment of open space, and a seamless relationship between interior and exterior. With an aerospace engineer father and an architect mother, this foundation continues to inform my artistic practice. In parallel with my work as a visual artist, my career has been in modern home design and construction, where proportion, light, material, and flow are created for optimal living. The discipline of building has sharpened my sensitivity to structure and the creatures that make them sing-humans..