Artist’s Statement

After many years of working almost exclusively in oil on canvas, I have begun making small pieces in acrylic on board. I’m enjoying the freedom to make changes very quickly since the acrylics are fast drying. These small pieces are allowing me a playfulness and the ability to pull images into being, one after another, before they can skitter away.

I have enjoyed working in a smaller format and having a number of images in process at the same time. They speak to one another and grow themselves into a sort of dailogue. Some of the boards have been collected together to form larger pieces, while maintaining their integrity as separate images. Others are pieces of a puzzle, carefully fitted together to make a whole.

One of the earliest pieces, the “Sun Down” series, began after watching a particularly stunning sunset out in my back garden and hearing the phrase “sun sinking down into the hills”, something often said around here, and having images of the sun actually bouncing around down in the bowls and hollows of the hills. These pieces mostly began with black on board and then the delight of throwing up a fire of cadmium red and yellow against that darkness.

Many of the images are taken from doodles, which are really notes to myself kept in a small sketchbook, and later expanded on the boards and in the paint. The most recent work is a series of figures placed inside various structures and interior spaces into which the viewer can peek. These are small stories which tell themselves to me in long quiet hours in my studio.

As has been true for me for more than thirty years, I find deep joy and connection to life in those hours and days in my studio, moving paint, stalking images.

www.elizabethnjohns.net