Lisa Tahar has lived in Leipzig since she was born there in 1963, and the city has been the backdrop to a full life. She raised four children, who are now grown, and worked in a number of professions before retirement gave her something she hadn’t had in years: time. In 2018 she spent it on a canvas.
It is a beautiful kind of story, the sort we tell ourselves when we worry we’ve left something too late. Tahar didn’t worry. She simply started.
The Man with the Happy Little Trees
Her inspiration, she says, came a long time ago from Bob Ross, the American painter who made landscape painting look like something anyone could try. Years later, after retiring, she finally did. She works in oil on canvas and paints landscapes, mostly her own motifs, now and then something she has come across on the internet.
There is no pretension in how she describes it, and that is part of the charm. Tahar doesn’t present herself as a rebel against the art establishment. She presents herself as a person who loves painting rivers.
Two Ducks, One River
Spend time with her work and you notice the ducks. A pair of them swims toward the riverbank in Summer Evening, where the sun is about to set and the whole scene hums with calm. Tahar describes the painting’s absolute tranquility as the key: no people, no other animals, nothing to pull the eye away from nature in the warm evening glow.
The same pair appears in Summer, a brighter daytime scene with trees and colourful flowers along a stone-bordered bank. Viewers, she hopes, will almost hear the water rippling and feel the warm breeze on their skin. It is a gentle ambition, and an honest one. She wants you to feel what it’s like to sit by a river on a perfect day and have nowhere to be.
A Winter That Glows
Then there is Winter Evening, which Tahar says one might first take for a simple scene: a river, a sunset, a cold season. What sets it apart is the colour. She paints winter in warm tones, which already gives the picture an unexpected glow.
But for her it holds more. She sees in it a portrait of Germany. The black, red and gold of the national flag are woven into the palette, and the river, in her reading, represents the division of the German people, which she describes as state-orchestrated, in the middle of weighty questions: mass migration, whether Russia is friend or foe, the energy transition, climate change. It is an unusually personal statement from a painter who otherwise favours peace, and a reminder that quiet landscapes can carry heavy thoughts.
From Bremen to Paris
What happened next might surprise even Tahar. Her first show was at Gallery Onil in Bremen in August 2021. Three more followed at the same gallery, including a duo exhibition in April 2022. Then came an invitation into a bigger world, guided by her curators, Mauro Giampieri and Prof. Marianna Jurcova of the Art and Culture Center VERUM.
Since 2023 her paintings have travelled across Europe: Venice’s Scuola Grande, Rome, Naples, Milan, Bratislava’s castle, Florence’s Palazzo Bellini, Prague, the Venice International Art Fair, an Austrian castle in Golling, and Galerie Mona Lisa in Paris. In September 2026 she returned to the Scuola Grande in Venice, where her international run had begun three years before. It is a long way from a first brush in 2018, and she has travelled it in less than a decade.
The Quiet Lesson
There’s a lesson in Tahar’s story, though she would likely be too modest to claim it. It is that a creative life doesn’t have a deadline. She didn’t paint to prove anything. She painted because a long-ago inspiration finally met a free afternoon, and because rivers and sunsets and a pair of ducks seemed worth the effort.
Now, with sixteen exhibitions behind her and a growing audience across Europe, Lisa Tahar continues to paint from Leipzig, the city she has always called home. The canvases are calm. The story behind them is anything but ordinary.
Explore her serene collection of original oil paintings, view upcoming exhibition dates, or bring a piece of quiet beauty into your own home.
- 🌐 Explore the Portfolio: lisatahar.de
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