Risa Korris has combined a career in film and painting since becoming the first staff camerawoman for CBS News and later as a producer of television commercials and feature films. Alongside the shooting assignments, came series of paintings that reflected her professional milieu. During the years she traveled the U.S. for CBS “60 Minutes”, her paintings were documentary in style filled with oversized men and women caught unawares involved in their own worlds and singular moments.

When her career moved into producing large budget television commercials for Sony, Clairol and Revlon, Risa’s paintings reflected a world of icons, flash and gloss. Exposed to the fashion industry’s top photographers and designers, she honed her own skills and chose subjects in trendy urban landscape and Hampton playgrounds, their bold physical perfection and self-absorption, their flawless good looks exuding confident sexuality.  The works found their way into Hollywood Studios and Hampton homes. Saks Fifth Avenue designed its window displays around the paintings forming a gallery down the city’s Fifth Avenue.

Risa’s film location work for features in New York, and later for Starz Encore and MCA in Hawaii and the Carolinas suggested a new challenge – how to capture movement over a series of paintings.  She chose for the Dancer series, members of companies Lar Lubovitch, Momix and Pilobolus.  The paintings contained their orchestrated movements broken into consecutive canvases, their bodies nearly abstract and sculptural in form against sky and water. Here again, the Litchfield hills offered inspiration as Risa set the dancers in the fields or by the pools of Roxbury and Bridgewater, Connecticut.  When she moved to the Southwest, Risa chose the Aspen Santa Fe Ballet dancers and found a new palette in the open skies of the high desert.  In 2009 as recipient of the prestigious Xavier Gonzalez art award, she focused on the major dance companies of Spain; Compaňia de Danza de Espaňia and Compaňia  Nacionale de Espaňia.  In addition to the canvases, Risa published “Danza”, a photographic essay.

Risa Korris’ FruitScape series is a modern play on the traditional still life.  The paintings set the bold sculptural shapes and brash colors of seasonal fruits against horizons forming surreal landscapes.

The series was first inspired by the harvested fruits and vegetables of Maple Bank Farm just down the road from Risa’s former home in Roxbury, Connecticut.  Ripe apples with swirling vines and full leaves, densely colored blueberries, pearl stranded corn, took on monumental scale in Risa’s large canvases.  As the summer moved into fall, Maple Bank owners Kathy and Howard set aside unusually shaped squash, brown speckled pears, and late season gourds. The landscapes went from verdant summer greens to drying leaves and finally snow covered ground. The early paintings in the series were exhibited at the Paris-New York-Kent Gallery and later at the Bachelier Cardonsky Gallery in Kent, Connecticut.

FruitScapes continued on through Risa’s travels to Brazil, Europe, Africa, California and Santa Fe.  In each she explored local markets searching for their most striking and natural produce. Mounds of oranges with blemished skins from a neighborhood market in Rio, pockmarked oranges from outside Essaouira photographed against a Moroccan doorway, dark purple grapes on the vines of a Franschhoek winery in South Africa, wildly shaped tomatoes from the small farms around Santa Fe, New Mexico, oversized lemons from trees in Palm Desert California, translucent grapes hauled up streets from Lisbon’s Mercado da Riberira.  The paintings filled large envelope shaped canvases - contemporary in style, yet utilizing the glazing techniques of old masters.