About

Bio
Liz is a landscape painter from Northern California, currently based in Chicago, Illinois. Her work revolves around the natural environments she grew up in and how a transition to Chicago has impacted her connections to the natural world. Liz is an undergraduate student at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago working towards earning a BFA in Painting.
Artist Statement
My work does not simply break silence but also creates it. The silence that one feels amongst a blanket of fog across a mass of emerald green pines. There is serenity in the silence of the mountains. A certain silence that seeps out of the trees I grew up next to, woefully traded for skyscrapers that break that same fog. I paint in memory of the childhood I long to experience once again. I break the silence with the same breath of a fallen tree - a breath heard only by those with the most attentive ears. Through repeating and overlapping abstracted forms from nature, I memorialize the environment that had given me my most peaceful experiences. Memories of counting the rings of trees found along trails to provide myself with a moment of rest and meditation have followed me in my move from Northern California to Chicago. Replacing the act with the repetition of painting these rings has allowed me to keep my past at the center of my growth. With an intense study of the real and the natural, I aim to replicate the same breathless feeling one gets when met with a vast land. Exploring the beauty of time and growth, my work becomes a personal study of how a landscape is naturally formed throughout centuries. Cherishing these moments of awe by placing them permanently onto a surface is a way for me to preserve the environment I remember, knowing that it will not always be there for me to return to. In exploring different perspectives from the micro to the macro, the abstracted to the real, I aim to utilize the meditative act of painting as a method for me to consider my own roots.