Liz Sullivan

Selected words from Liz Sullivan exhibition opening

- Robyn Burgess

…..I visited Lizzies studio recently. She shuffled new unfinished works for me to see; works that she moves swiftly over from painting to painting , a string of paintings in constant rotation , altering , layering her beloved oil paint. Seeing these works on the wall now, I realize with a shudder that these were many of the works I saw recently ;  they now stare silently at me , unrecognizable……

…..Lizzie is curious and open to anything ; she is also patient and wise enough to tap dance around endless possibilities in her paintings. She walks through her local terrain almost daily , taking photographs and relying on memory to carry variations of this landscape home. The photographs are a secondary tool, used to loosely retain ideas of form and space, light, colour, specific undergrowth, the movement of water etc. Lizzie is not a ‘plein air’ artist who paints on site in the landscape. The photographs are discarded quickly. I believe it is then that these paintings become more than a realistic version of her landscape and a much more complex interrogation of paint itself alongside the intimate parts and places of Lizzie’s mind…..

…..Lizzie paints with a joyous intensity , spontaneity and freedom ; with a most gracious homage to nature. These are works of the body and mind in constant flux with her subject and the atrocities , beauty and research of oil painting…..

…..I think in her most powerful works, Lizzie introduces a metaphor through landscape; one of a fragile symbol of our natural world. Much of this fragility is conveyed in the almost calligraphic depiction of grasses, weeds, wildflowers, branches and reeds which often become an entangled web of writhing colour and form towards a claustrophobic space. Lizzie’s fascination with Jackson Pollock’s labyrinth of lines is evident. Her work is twofold – these are paintings of beauty, whereas there maybe an ominous threat if one dares to enter the web she weaves……

……Lizzie has links to tradition , but through many languages. She has opened a floodgate to the inner sensations of the mind and the heart. Here resides that space between the figurative and the abstract. The place for so much intelligent and imaginative activity……

Certainly Lizzie is an artist of our futures. With stealth , bravery and technical finesse, Lizzie offers us the elusive heart of this exhibition ; the naked landscape as a measure of an internal rather than an external journey…..

….And finally, from a distance, the image ferments on the surface of a beautiful, perhaps pretty representation of the landscape and we are invited to a closer inspection; we are presented with Lizzie at her best and most powerful –  convulsed, wriggling, flicking works of many gestures and practices; layer upon layer – lines are short or long and wavering. Without severing ties with the figurative, we are awash in a formless place of ……something else…

2/3/2024