[4] She resumed her studied during 1917/18, spending three terms, this time, at the (subsequently renamed and then merged) "Königliche Kunstgewerbeschule" (loosely, "Royal Academy of Applied Art") in Munich.
Between 1919 and 1929, albeit with several major breaks, she lodged at a succession of farm cottages and other dwellings in and around the village in order to pursue her career as an artist.
Art was not always sufficiently lucrative to pay the rent, and she frequently supplemented her income with farm work, especially during the crisis years immediately following the war.
Two large vases with scenic motifs and one image of a kneeling madonna with child, all of them featuring Oppel's painting from the 1930s, have been located in a private collection on Ischia, however.
Among those in the circle to which Lisel Oppel adhered were Kurt Craemer and his friend Karli Sohn-Rethel who shared a house in Positano till 1938.
Two years earlier right-wing populists had interpreted the country's parliamentary deadlock as a political opportunity, successfully taking power in January 1933.
[4] In Italy, a post-democratic government was also making life harder for artists not instinctively drawn to support the increasingly bizarre and destructive whims of the leadership, and in 1937 Lisel Oppel again came back to Worpswede.
Oppel was conscripted to work as a technical draftswoman for the vast AG Weser shipbuilding company, and forced to live in a rented room in Bremen.
In 1940 she collected her son and together they made their way south again, this time heading for the Chiemsee, a reedy lake in the marshy land between Munich and Salzburg.
the move appears to have been the result of a characteristically impulsive decision, although a desire to get the child away from the British bombing would have provided an obvious rationale for it.
[9] She was back in Catholic territory again, and her output included more than painted tiles: there were angel-candlesticks and madonnas, kneeling or sitting, cradling a little Baby Jesus in her arms.
[4] For part of her nearly three-year stint in Upper Bavaria Oppel lived and worked at a pottery factory on the shores of another lake, at Dießen am Ammersee.
Alongside the commercial work necessary to feed herself and her son, Lissel Oppel never abandoned what she regarded as her real profession, as a "fine art" painter.
[4] She built her reputation with buyers and critics, through her characteristic landscapes depicting the Teufelsmoor (loosely, "Devil's bog"), the fenland surrounding Worpswede in the otherwise mostly unpeopled countryside north of Bremen.
This turned out badly, however, so she removed him from that institution and sent him instead to a "Bremen" secondary school which had been evacuated to a site at Lofer, just outside Salzburg, where he remained a pupil all the way through till September 1945.
[4] With Claudio securely settled in the south Oppel returned to Worpswede where she lived out the rest of the war, supporting herself with work for a ceramics factory in Bremen.
Her penultimate foreign trip was to Egypt, from where she referenced the Nunc dimittis ominously in a letter: "Now I can depart in peace, since mine eyes have seen ..." By the time she got back to Worpswede she clearly knew she was unwell, but she nevertheless insisted on travelling to Seville to experience the Easter celebrations there, impressions of which she recorded in an interesting series of watercolors.
[4] A particular joy in her painting, was children, often at play, in the countryside, which picked up on themes that had also inspired an earlier generation of Worpswede painters.
Her image of "Lantern Children", with a background clearly showing the Hamme flatlands, achieved particular commercial success during the 1950s: this was a subject of which she painted countless variations.
The life of a freelance artist who had eluded her as a young woman became a reality, and she was no longer driven to offer her services to industrial pottery factories.
[4] In 2008 her son Claudio, by this point described in sources as a "retired teacher", gifted a number of her paintings and other elements from her inheritance to the "Worpswede Archive" in the Barkenhoff, a large reassigned farm house in the heart of the artists' town.