"The Essence of Creativity Is Not Just About Color and Painting... Creativity Is Also Healing Yourself"

A Conversation with Lissa Herschleb

There are people you meet who make you feel like the world is a more interesting place just because they exist in it. Prince was one of those people. Lissa Herschleb is another.

I got to Café Aroma first and got in line. I texted her asking if she wanted anything, hoping she would answer before I got to the register. She didn't. I ordered a chai... half sweet, half spicy. I've ordered chai before but never that particular combination. It felt right though. I am half sweet, half spicy myself and depending on the day can go heavier one way or another. With Lissa I was feeling more sweet than spicy. I was just about to pay when her text popped up on my screen and there it was. Chai… Half sweet, half spicy. I looked up at the lady behind the counter, tickled. Please make that two, she looked at me like… what is she smiling about? I brought them outside eager to find a quiet little two top away from the noise, and then I remembered... we're on 4th Street in San Rafael. We were just going to have to stumble through and make due.

Lissa appeared in monochromatic layers... a long sleeved taupe top with a white embroidery. And then the jewelry — all of it handmade by her. Draped around her neck were square ceramic beads in grey, 172 of them, every single one handmade... extruded, sliced, each edge squared by hand with a paddle, then stamped one by one. And every once in a while tucked between them were amber/gold colored glass bead from Africa and would catch the light against all that grey. Her earrings, also ceramic, also made by her own hands, imprinted with a mandala pattern and finished with a black wash. Same vibe. Even her silver/white hair matched. She was a piece of art. And then I looked up and met her eyes... clear blue, no clouds, like open sky. Just like those African glass beads — one unexpected pop of color in all that grey. I think she is comfortable in the shadows. That is where the unseen hangs out.

The first thing she told me was that she doesn't like doing interviews. Doesn't like being on camera. So I said, teasingly, fine... the camera may be on, it may be off, she'll never know. I just kept it rolling. And within a couple of minutes neither of us remembered it was there.

We have known each other for years, Lissa and I, initially connected by our shared love for Michael Aragon, and now every single encounter leaves me wanting to know her better.

That's Lissa Herschleb.

Lissa is an empath to the umpth degree. Deeply connected to everything around her... the seen, but mostly the unseen. The quintessential blessing and curse scenario. This gift has not always been easy to carry. She has been this way her whole life, feeling everything and everyone all at once, the energy in a room, the weight of what goes unspoken, the soul of a stranger in a single exchange. She'll be the first to tell you that being born that open has been, in her words, "quite an issue in life to navigate." As a young woman she would become a chameleon in crowded rooms, mirroring whoever was nearby just to figure out how to exist among people. I asked her if it was hard to know where her feelings ended and everyone else's began. Of course it was. It took decades... and five years of deliberate, rigorous self-observation after her sister passed... to finally get grounded. She turned 74 in April. She says she has finally planted her roots. Speaking of roots... what does she do when she's not in the studio? She gardens. Has been doing it professionally since she was 38. It's back in her life now and she couldn't be happier about it and if her garden is anything like her jewelry, it is spectacular.

We dove right into the conversation - she doesn't do surface level. Nothing about her is surface level. It's all the deep end. OK, let’s go!

Born into creativity... her parents met at Overland in art class. Her dad was impressed by her mom because she won the poster contest. He tried too but didn't win. They were two peas in a pod, she said, speaking the same language... the language of art. And that affects everything you do. Her father was a watercolorist.

Some people think you choose your parents before you are born and after hearing this, that may be entirely true in Lissa's case.

I asked her what got her started in art and it seems she started at the beginning... her first love was the pencil. "When I would sharpen my pencils, I would always smell the wood," she told me. The cedar, the lead. A different era of pencil making. She could have drawn forever. The stark drama of black and white. Line, shadow, texture.

For a long time it was strictly black and white. You know how you have a plate of food and the sweet potatoes are so good you want to keep that flavor in your mouth as long as you can before you get to the mac and cheese? Not mix them up. They belong together but there is a right order. That is what she was doing with the black and white... loving them up for everything they were before adding color, which is a “whole nuther” flavor so to speak. Then a friend named Hap Clebon gave her some watercolors and she started putting just a touch of color right in the elbows and knuckles of her figure drawings. Just there. And then it started creeping in more. And more. Until eventually the pieces became full color.

"I do love color," she says, catching herself, as if she had hurt color's feelings and wanted to reassure it. "I have this kind of battle with color and black and white."

As she carefully described all of this, it reminded me of her handmade beads... black and white, and every once in a while a pop of color.

She went on to study at CCAC... the California College of Arts and Crafts... for three years, not to graduate but for the experience. She enrolled in a class called Symbolic Realism that never quite gelled for her. What she found instead was something better: a teacher."

Jewels of Wisdom... The Lesson She Never Forgot

His name was Ralph Borge, from Point Reyes. She didn't always agree with his subject matter. But he gave her jewels of wisdom she has carried and passed on her whole life.

He told her: Learn to draw the figure perfectly. Line, texture, volume, light, shadow, proportion. And then your abstractions will have an underlying sensibility.

She took that wisdom on the road. For over twenty years she drove the country alone, packing her canopy and her work into a car, following the circuit of juried art shows. Denver. Coconut Grove. New York. The Pacific Northwest. The Southwest. Driving 13 hours a day by herself sometimes, never afraid. A West Coast home base but essentially a nomad, making enough for gas money to get to the next show, making friends with truck drivers, staying in hotels. She called it a great lifestyle.

The path she took was so unique. Many people that age at that time settled down, had a family, raised kids. She was out there like an art gypsy... and I say that in the best way possible. In a way Lissa was an art mama and all her pieces were her babies. Selling just enough to get her to the next city. What a gift she must have been to anyone lucky enough to cross her path.

And when proud parents would bring their young artists over to her booth, she would pass on what Bourge had given her. "I have something interesting to tell you that my art teacher taught me," she would say. "Learn to draw the figure perfectly. And then your abstractions will have an underlying sensibility." Because as she put it... "when you learn the discipline of drawing, your experience of quality of life, the dimension of life can be abstracted."

"A lot of people go, 'It's so hard to abstract,'" she says. "Well, it is... because it's not real. And that's why it's good for you."

Easy for you maybe, I teased... because that's kind of the world you live in. She contemplates. "My abstractions are only abstract because it's how I see the world. I don't want a face to look like a face anymore. But I want to indicate a face."

In my short time interviewing artists I have started to notice a common thread... the very skilled artists that have been doing this their whole life do this. They leave a lot of breathing room for your own imagination to take flight and soar.

"Even if it's realism, it's open to your interpretation," she says. "Why do you love the painting of the Marin hills with the shrubs and the trees growing certain ways? Because you want to relate to it emotionally... remind you of something good where you live. And then you stop seeing it because it's so familiar."

Which is why she always asks... when was the last time you moved your artwork around? Did you paint your walls? Because when you paint your walls a color, all of a sudden the work looks different. You get to see it again.

I had to laugh at that because I can completely relate. I am constantly moving my artwork around, painting a wall, rearranging my furniture. My small apartment is my sanctuary... a breathing piece of art, always changing, always growing. I feel like noticing things is a real gift. I remember as a kid going to the dentist and telling my mom they had changed the color of the rocks in the fish tank. How did you notice that? she said. So she started playing a game with me (as an adult). Whenever I came to her house she would move something out of place and wait to see how long it took me to notice. Oh, you moved the picture.

Being an artist is being an observer of life. A constant observer.

I am starting to learn that good art doesn't deliver meaning... it creates the conditions for it. It holds the container.

The Clayboard Discovery

A fellow artist in her studio complex handed her a 6x6 piece of clayboard and said simply: here, try this. Lissa picked up a brush loaded with black gouache, wet it, and swept it across the surface the way a kindergartner would. When it dried, she recognized something in the result... a dimensional, layered depth that echoed her very first finger-painting memory in Mrs. Brown's class. That pink pigment on glossy paper. She still loves pink to this day and traces it right back to that moment. Maybe that is why she adds the spicy to her sweet chai. She can't stand sweet art. "I don't like sweet things. I don't like sweet art."

I am impressed by how Lissa seems to have a photographic memory that goes all the way back to childhood. She can tap back into those younger versions of herself with incredible attention to detail... the smell, the feel, the colors. She is kind of like a time traveler in that way. Nothing seems linear and everything seems attainable. And I think that is part of her living in the unseen.

She writes on her website that her approach is to "go back to the child... a place where I went many years ago while painting. I believe children are natural creators and if we adults can let go of our calculating and over-identified nature, we can bring forth that undiscovered playfulness with the patina of a life lived over it."

She went on to do around 150 small portraits on clayboard. The substrate became her signature... its ability to be sanded back to white, its unpredictable relationship with gouache. "It's kind of like a chase," she says. "You're chasing this paint to do what you want."

She had a studio on Mark Drive in San Rafael for seventeen years. Lots of generations of points of view, she says... watercolor, gouache, claybody, jewelry, dog portraits... never repeating herself. When galleries asked her to replicate a piece that sold, she said she couldn't. Not wouldn't. Couldn't.

"I don't make art to sell," she says. "I just hope it sells. That's why I live a very lean life."

The Jazz Series... In Honor of Michael Aragon

When Chuck Sher... Michael Aragon's dearest friend and one of the most respected jazz music publishers in the world... was putting together a book called Beginnings and Endings, he knew it needed faces. He turned to Lissa to paint the jazz cats whose music lived in those pages. She calls them her jazz portraits.

She had never painted a human portrait in gouache on clayboard. Dog and cat portraits, yes... Years ago I commissioned her to paint my beloved cat Micro, who I now get to look at every day. What she really spends time on is the eyes because she wants to be sure she gets the soul of the creature correctly. As she notes with a grin, "but they're covered with fur." Some of these jazz cats have beards, like Cannonball Adderley, but I am assuming that is different, lol. Human faces are another matter entirely. The tone, the shadow, the weight of a person's eyes. The way decades of a particular life show up in the lines around a mouth.

She got to know them, connected to them in the best way possible... through their music while she painted, until their faces started to take shape.

Miles Davis was the most compelling.

"I was getting him, I was getting it," she says, leaning forward. "And I'm going... you're almost there. But there's just something. What is it?"

His face had been shaped by decades of playing, transformed by all those years of breath and pressure and sound.

His lips. Strange highlights that technically shouldn't be there. She put them in anyway.

"Now you're talking to me. Now you're talking to me."

Wes Montgomery. Dexter Gordon... "What a handsome man. I was gone." Cannonball Adderley. Miles Davis. Charlie Parker. Count Basie. Benny Golson. Bill Evans. Each painted in black and white gouache on small clayboard panels, then mounted on birch plywood. The graphic designer who worked on Chuck's book loved them so much he bought Wes Montgomery and Dexter Gordon for himself.

The rest of these portraits will be available at the Aragon Foundation Gala on May 9th. Cannonball Adderley. Miles Davis. Charlie Parker. Count Basie. Benny Golson. Bill Evans.

Two Souls, One Agreement

Lissa and Michael Aragon go way back... she was 25 when they met, she laughs. He was a jazz drummer, a bad boy, a force of nature. Some people come into your life and you just know — this is not an accident. These are the people who have a deep soul connection, who were supposed to be in one another's lives to teach each other lessons. An agreement on a soul contract level. That was Lissa and Michael. They had their time together, went their separate ways, and then wove back into each other's lives the way people do when they are genuinely meant to know one another. After his son Frank passed, Michael asked if he could come live with her. He practiced drums in the next room while she painted in the one beside it. That says everything you need to know about who they were to each other.

Lissa stayed a loyal friend all the way until he took his last breath, alongside his wife and her good friend Amanda. She joked that it took Michael 70 years to learn how to have a good marriage. It's a bit of an inside joke — nobody quite knows how many wives Michael had, or how many kids for that matter, because he had a way of introducing people as his kids whether they were biological or not. Nobody ever knew and it didn't matter to Michael. To be part of his family was a gift.

And then, right in the middle of us talking about Michael, two yellow school buses pulled up with engines so loud they drowned out everything we were saying. WTF I thought. I looked up. There on the side of both buses, in bold black writing: Michael's Transportation.

We stared at each other. Then we burst out laughing.

Of course. Of course in the middle of a conversation about Michael Aragon these buses showed up. That's just how things work when Michael is involved. Even now. Even from wherever he is.

Two Women at a Table

Our conversation danced and weaved and bobbed from NDEs to collective meditations to living in a simulation and AI. Stuff you can't talk to just anybody about in line at a grocery store. We got so lost in it we had to keep running off to feed the meter. We never ran out of things to gab about. Lissa is fascinating.

At some point she looked across the table, locked eyes with me and said "you are some kind of marvel." It made me smile in a super hero kind of way where my tooth may have sparkled. She went on... amazed by what I was doing with the Aragon Foundation, said it was out of her realm. She called me a doer, said I had a deeply creative root and an empathy that wants to share, give and nurture. She even said she thought I could be a great art critic. Coming from someone who was literally born into creativity and has spent 74 years living it, I was honored she thought so.

I don't think what I am doing with the Aragon Foundation is anything out of the ordinary. I am just clunking along, learning things on the way. But I do feel quite divinely guided. By Michael himself. He may be my archangel in all of this, the little devel that he is.

That is what Lissa does. She sees people. She saw me, and I saw her, and somewhere in the noise and the chai and the diesel fumes from those Michael's Transportation buses, goodness was exchanged.

That is what Michael Aragon always drew together... people who speak the same language. Many times that language was music, and more times than not… that language was love. Lissa called it the warp and woof of his tapestry. We are woven into it, she said. Deeply, and still discovering how.

The Gala: May 9th

Join us on May 9th at the Aragon Foundation Gala.

Lissa's jazz portrait series will be among the works available at the benefit auction. Cannonball Adderley. Miles Davis. Charlie Parker. Count Basie. Benny Golson. Bill Evans.

The proceeds go toward funding youth arts programs... choirs, dance, drums, theater... for kids in Marin City, the Canal neighborhood, and beyond.

Michael would think that's important. He more than thought it. He lived it.

Come find us on May 9th. There will be music, there will be dance, there will be art, and somewhere in the room, if you're paying attention, you might just feel that familiar presence... laughing, leaning in, making sure you don't miss a thing. Who knows, a Michael's Transportation bus could even show up.

The Aragon Foundation Gala takes place on May 9th. For tickets and more information, visit [insert link]. To learn more about Lissa Herschleb and her work visit lherschleb.com.