LISA EDELSTEIN - From Acting to Directing, Writing & Visual Art

How can the arts help us examine and engage with social issues? How do our families shape our views, memories, and experience of the world?

From her role as Dr. Lisa Cuddy on the hit Fox series House M.D, to her starring role as Abby McCarthy in Bravo's first scripted series Girlfriends' Guide to Divorce, Lisa Edelstein's range of roles are as diverse as her talent. Some of Edelstein's feature credits include Keeping the Faith, What Women Want, Daddy Daycare, As Good as It Gets, and Fathers and Sons. She played a Holocaust survivor and adopted mother in the drama television series Little Bird. The story centres on a First Nations woman who was adopted into a Jewish family during the Sixties Scoop, as she attempts to reconnect with her birth family and heritage.

Lisa’s career began by writing, composing, and performing an original AIDS awareness musical Positive Me at the renowned La Mama Experimental Theater Club in New York City. In the wake of COVID, Lisa began to paint using old family photographs as starting points. Her incredibly detailed paintings capture intimate relationships and spontaneous moments with honesty and compassion.

"I have always thrown myself into everything, and that includes terrible things because I want to have the whole experience. Even if I know it's going to hurt for better or for worse, that has been how I've lived my life. And so it's given me a lot of information and allowed me to play a lot of different roles and understand a lot of different points of view.

I'm the kind of person who – I don't do well in lectures - I don't like sitting for a very long time, but if I can listen while I'm drawing or painting, then I will actually retain more of what I'm hearing because it's connected now to what I've actually made while I'm listening to it. When I look at my paintings, I remember what I was reading at each section of the painting, so that's the way my brain works. And I think a lot of people who are creative, that's the way their brain works, where we need to develop one skill in order to develop another. And using your imagination is key to all of it."

https://lisaedelstein.komi.io/
www.lisaedelsteinpaintings.com/
www.imdb.com/name/nm0249046

www.creativeprocess.info
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Photo credit: Mitch Stone
Courtesy of the artist