Stopping and Staring
Recent Works by Lisa Houck
A Solo exhibition at the Center for Maine Craft in West Gardiner.
On view September 25 – November 10, 2026
For decades, Lisa Houck has returned to Maine’s Belgrade Lakes region, drawn by its quiet beauty, expansive waters, and slower pace of life. Time spent at the lake offers her an opportunity to read, think, observe, and reconnect with the natural world-experiences that continue to energize and shape her studio practice.
Stopping and Staring brings together linoleum block prints, mosaics, and watercolors inspired by birds, trees, landscapes, and the interconnected rhythms of nature. Across these varied media, Houck transforms familiar elements of the natural world into imaginative environments where observation gives way to wonder.
Houck has created a series of block prints centered on birds. Abstracted and simplified, her birds inhabit landscapes alive with patterned circles and swirling lines. These marks can suggest weather systems, planets, microscopic particles, or the cycles of life, creating a sense that the birds exist within a vast and constantly shifting universe.
Trees are at the heart of Houck’s mosaic work. She imagines them as individuals with distinct personalities: quiet and shy, exuberant, easily swayed, or larger than life. Surrounding each tree is a small universe of creatures, landscapes, weather, and organic forms. Cells, flowers, droplets, planets, and spirals echo throughout the compositions, connecting the intimate details of the natural world to larger cycles of growth, change, and renewal.
In my mosaic work, I am inspired by trees which embody personalities: some are quiet and shy, some are dizzy and easily swayed, some are larger than life, some are exuberant. Here, too, I use imagery that can evoke cells, flowers, droplets, planets, spirals and seasonal cycles in the natural world. The trees are placed in a variety of environments with little creatures and landscapes and weather patterns swirling around them; each one in its own little world.
In her watercolors, Houck takes an equally imaginative approach to the landscape. Geological formations, layers of strata, shifting continents, improbable plants, birds, and other creatures come together in worlds that are recognizable yet delightfully unexpected. Her larger works extend an invitation to get lost in them, wander through it, and look at the familiar world with a little more wonder.
Across these works, Houck connects to nature in such a playful way, that you naturally want to pay close attention. A bird becomes part of a cosmic pattern. A tree takes on a personality. A landscape becomes a place where geological time, seasonal cycles, and imagined worlds coexist. Stopping and Staring celebrates the rewards of close observation and the limitless possibilities that emerge when we take the time to truly look.
Should you find yourself passing through West Gardiner with time to spare, we encourage you to wander in. You just might find yourself Stopping and Staring.
Visit the Center for Maine Craft:
288 Lewiston Rd West Gardiner, ME 04345
Open Daily, 9am – 6pm
(207)588-0021
center@shopmainecraft.com
