Interview #1
For the first edition of Silky Notes: In Conversation, artist and writer Jasmine Rodriguez speaks with Toronto-based painter and sculptor Lisa Gal about intuition, online communities, routine, Korean aesthetics, and allowing material to lead the way.
Lisa Gal is a Toronto-based painter and sculptor working primarily in oil and wood. Now 29, she has spent the past several years developing a practice built around intuition, pigment, and recently a more exploratory body of work in salvaged and whittled wood.
Each painting descends you into her imaginative world. Bright, smeared, wrangled. There’s a soporific nature in her work, a trompe l’oeil that wrangles you in and enhances your life. The words used to describe why people are so transfixed with orchids within, The Orchid Thief, remind me of what makes Lisa Gal’s work so unbelievably fascinating. “Mystery, beauty, unknowability.” We sign off about precariousness, European heat waves, and fashioning hope in spite of it all.
Lisa Gal was interviewed in July 2026 by California based artist and writer, Jasmine Rodriguez.
Lisa Gal is a Toronto-based painter and sculptor working primarily in oil and wood. Now 29, she has spent the past several years developing a practice built around intuition, pigment, and recently a more exploratory body of work in salvaged and whittled wood.
Each painting descends you into her imaginative world. Bright, smeared, wrangled. There’s a soporific nature in her work, a trompe l’oeil that wrangles you in and enhances your life. The words used to describe why people are so transfixed with orchids within, The Orchid Thief, remind me of what makes Lisa Gal’s work so unbelievably fascinating. “Mystery, beauty, unknowability.” We sign off about precariousness, European heat waves, and fashioning hope in spite of it all.
Lisa Gal was interviewed in July 2026 by California based artist and writer, Jasmine Rodriguez.
LG: I paint mostly in oil, and lately I've been spending more time with wood, whittling it into small sculptural pieces. I've worked with wood before, but only in passing. Now I want to give it more room, though not in a rigid, scheduled way, more sideways, when I have the headspace for it. I'm waiting for a stretch of time where I can be a bit absentminded with it.
JR: You've said you still feel like a student of oil paint, even after years of working with it. Can you say more about that?
LG: Every painting shows me how many different directions it could go in. I don't think that feeling ever fully goes away, and I don't want it to.
JR: Your process seems very grounded, spiritual, almost ritualistic.
LG: I am in fact very spiritual, I’m glad you noticed! I do stay pretty focused once I'm in a piece, almost in this meditative state. I set my space up around whatever I'm gravitating toward that day.
LG: Tumblr gets written off as this dead platform, but it's still such an active place for artists. I've always had a bit of an introverted streak, and Tumblr gave me something like a community even if it's really just strangers scattered across time zones, connected by what they post and care about. Your peers there become collaborators, not competitors. A lot of those online friendships turned into real ones. A mutual becomes a curator, becomes an artist, becomes a collector. Everyone builds each other up.
LG: I'd tell her to lean into the things that feel cringey or uncomfortable. These are gems of moments, where you learn to be less judgmental, less afraid. I'd also tell her to use her youth to her advantage. People respond well to young people who ask questions and ask for things. Ask a lot of questions. You'll hit blocks, but they're just tests to see how much you actually want something. Push through them.
JR: You mentioned a newer piece built around the thematics of fire, which feels like something anti-Earth sign.
LG: I try to remember that fire eventually becomes soil, and new life can grow out of what it destroys.
JR: What is one taboo that people tend to have about artists?
LG: That we are “cool.” Most of us are just big kids running around and expressing ourselves wholeheartedly. We are all just big kids with freedom.
LG: My experience with the world around me. How I see and feel and think about the things around me, refining my eyes. This just requires being present, so I have to be thoughtful about what kind of experiences I engage in. YES to delightful spontaneity. My relationship with routine, I used to call it discipline, but one of my artist friends called the same thing structure. I realized I was cloaking my days in something scarier and stricter than it had to be. Branch outside of it once in a while but always try to come back to a stable routine.
JR: What has been a recent poetic encounter that took you away recently?
LG: (laughs) Honestly, it must have been some interaction with my crush. I don’t know if a summer is complete without a crush.
LG: Nothing quite does it like a book. But I do enjoy watching my friends who are filmmakers fashioning their work. It’s almost like each frame in itself is a painting.
JR: What does an ideal studio day look like for you?
LG: Up at seven. Tea first, then toast with a lot of good butter. Exercise, then a protein-heavy brunch and a shower. In the studio by around noon. I paint, and somewhere in there I take an hour to meditate. Ideally someone visits the studio too, a friend, another artist, a curator, a collector, really anyone. I love connecting with people while I work. I keep painting until I'm hungry, then a big, beautiful dinner. Finito.
LG: I like that. I think the pieces that stay with people are the ones that don't fully explain themselves.
JR: Any final thoughts before the show?
LG: Just that I'm looking forward to what's next. More time whittling away with wood, more paintings I don't fully know the ending of yet. I want to really master oil paint in a way that I can distinguish which path is best and why, instead of being guided by intuitive feeling. Or maybe what I really want is to polish that intuition. I think it could take a whole lifetime, which I am really excited about.