Liz Sullivan

Liz Sullivan’s latest body of new paintings are vibrant microcosms. Images are teaming with organic life matter and that odd, yet appropriate word fecund comes to mind. These tableaux offer a fully immersive experience of the green grasses of our backyard. Lime-silver grass blades and pink-purple fluffy fronds, prance about with the common, unexotic weeds. Not just pretty flowers, we see native grasses from central Victoria and some of the Tasmanian varieties. Liz consciously finds beauty in the ordinary. 

“They are mowed down, the weeds dry up and shrink and then reflower and the life cycle begins again.”

Most of the ‘grass paintings’ are seen from a low-level perspective as if we were an ant looking up at a gigantic ground plane of weeds.  A rhythm design is going on amongst the grasses and we are carried away into the flow of it all in a gentle swathe or a drift. It’s all rather musical. Unsurprisingly, the titles of paintings come from songs the artist is listening to in the studio. 

Liz describes her work as a meditation where you can disappear into the landscape. There are not very many overt referential horizon lines and for all the pervasive ‘pictorial reality’ or naturalism, the pictures are foremostly paintings about the act of painting. As evident in Falling for You a painting that could almost be read from any angle. It is a busy all-over type painting reminiscent of Abstract Expressionist or indigenous Australian paintings, whereby an all-over pattern is a central concern. It’s as much about the design as the ‘picture’ or subject. 

Liz Sullivan’s artwork is primarily about mark-making, very spontaneous and the subject just happens to be the landscape. The visual elements of line and colour are well activated to keep the eyes moving about on the surface. Working on primed panels, the marks bounce off the surface.  The artist insists each blade of grass, each leaf, each mark, is there for itself. 

Sullivan is as much interested in the light and dark, as she is in mark-making.

“What makes a light area light, are the darks sitting next to it.”

Liz Sullivan has been a finalist in the Doug Moran prize, The Glover prize, The Kennedy prize the Archibald ‘Salon des refuse’ and was the inaugural recipient in 1984 of the Clemenger Art prize.

Kareen Anchen – Gallery Director

Cascade Art, 2023