LISA TISHMAN

Collages reconstruct rooms

A Davie homemaker and artist creates surreal collages from magazine and newspaper clippings.

BY DANIEL CHANG

dchang@MiamiHerald.com

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Lisa Tishman is a suburban homemaker and an artist, though not necessarily in that order.

Growing up in a nice Jewish home in Miami Beach, says Tishman, who now lives in Davie, ``marriage and a family was really important for me.''

But so was art, which is why the 1978 graduate of Miami Beach Senior High attended the Rhode Island School of Design, where she earned a degree in textile design.

While Tishman worked with Miami-based textile company David & Dash after graduating from RISD in 1982, it wasn't until five years ago that she began creating the collages that won her a spot in The Miami Herald's Art on Newsprint series.

Tishman creates three-dimensional collages out of clipped photos from magazines and newspapers. The clippings are assembled by perspective, color and light -- and create a new image altogether.

The collages are all of household interiors: dining rooms abutting patios abutting living rooms. She reads (and clips from) Architectural Digest and Home and Design magazines, shopping catalogs, the newspaper and just about any printed material where she can find inspiration.

It takes her three to four weeks to compose a collage, and each work contains a dog or cat.

That's Tishman's nod to her beloved toy poodles, Duke and Tiny. And five percent of each work she sells goes to the Animal Recreation and Rehabilitation Center in Davie -- the caregivers that helped Duke recover from a spinal injury.

The finished collages evoke a sense of wonder by blending the different living areas into a single, unexpected setting. They are, for Tishman, imagined interiors.

And that's how Tishman began making her art: by imagining how a piece of furniture in one photo would look when she placed it in a different context.

As Tishman remembers it, she was thumbing through a catalog one day when something caught her eye. 'I just saw one piece of furniture . . . and said, `God, it would be fun to put this in a different room,' '' she says.

After Tishman cut and pasted her first collage, more followed. The Yellow Room, which appears in The Miami Herald today, was among her first works.

''I could make 100 of these because I just love to do them,'' she says.

Tishman never showed her art at galleries, though. Instead, she reproduced the collages in giclée print and hung them in the Davie home she shares with her husband, Andrew; their son, Bradley, 14, and the poodles.

''I was making these, and . . . people had never really seen anything like it,'' Tishman says.

Then a girlfriend saw the work and encouraged Tishman to show and sell it.

Tishman has exhibited and sold her works at local festivals such as the Delray Art Affair, at a boat show in Haulover Beach and elsewhere.

To date, Tishman says, she has sold a number of her works, with her most popular piece being one titled The Pianist, of which she has sold five.

But she has no gallery representation. It's not for lack of trying, Tishman says. One gallerist wanted to keep the original collages, which Tishman resisted. Another one was not a fan.

Tishman says she understands if not everyone gets her work.

''It takes a certain mentality to break into because it's not your typical work,'' she says.