Lisa Marie Coyne isn’t the kind of artist who chases spectacle. Her photographs don’t shout. They rest quietly, asking you to sit with them. They draw you in slowly. One of her pieces, The Light through Darkness, was born during a walk through Rineen Woods in West Cork with her sons. That day was split—serene sunlight above, a storm brewing inside. As she moved through the trees, light broke through a dense patch of darkness. It didn’t solve anything. But it stopped her. A camera in hand, she captured it. The image, like many of hers, doesn’t separate joy from grief, clarity from confusion. It holds both. That’s what makes her work sit with you long after you’ve looked away.
Coyne’s approach to photography is rooted in noticing. Not chasing. It’s about being present in a moment long enough to recognize its shape. And Angle is a perfect example of that kind of noticing.
Angle wasn’t planned. It didn’t involve hours of setup or professional gear. It happened after groceries, in the kind of moment most people rush past. But Coyne doesn’t rush. She steps back. She looks again.
The story behind the photograph is simple: errands were done, the day was sunny, and the light hit just right. Coyne glanced at a building across the way—bold, bright, unapologetically architectural. The kind of structure that demands attention if you know how to look. She didn’t have her pro camera with her. Just her phone. But that didn’t stop her.
She moved around the building, waiting for the right composition to show itself. What she found was a tight angle—lines climbing upward, converging into a deep blue sky streaked with just a few white clouds. The building’s burnt orange popped against the blue, turning the whole thing into something more than architecture. It was movement. A visual rhythm. A kind of stairway that led nowhere and everywhere all at once.
The perspective plays with scale—makes the building feel almost like it’s reaching. You can feel the stretch in the frame. Coyne caught something that most people walk by. And then, when reviewing the image later, she noticed something else. A bird—what looks like a bird of prey—perched quietly in the top right of the frame. She hadn’t seen it when she took the photo. But there it was.
For her, the bird wasn’t just a detail. It felt like a gift. Something sacred tucked into an already charged image. It changed the energy of the piece. Gave it a stillness. A weight. A kind of watchful presence. The whole photograph became something more than color and shape. It became a kind of prayer.
That’s what makes Coyne’s work resonate. She doesn’t need spectacle. She works with what’s in front of her—the quiet brilliance of a good sky, the angle of a building, the surprise of a bird. There’s no ego in it. No performance. Just a deep attentiveness and an openness to whatever might show up.
In Angle, we see Coyne’s love for structure—her appreciation for form and perspective—but we also see her instinct for wonder. She doesn’t separate the technical from the emotional. She lets them blend. The photograph works as a study in line and color, yes. But it also holds something deeper. An unexpected visitor. A blessing.
Coyne’s photography reminds you to look up. To step back. To pay attention—not because something big is about to happen, but because something already is. You just have to be still enough to notice.
There’s a humility in her process, a kind of reverence for the ordinary. And somehow, in her hands, the ordinary turns sacred. She catches the magic that hides in plain sight—the light through branches, the corner of a building, the quiet glance of a bird overhead.
And once you’ve seen it, you can’t help but start looking for it in your own day.
