about Liz

My first year in college I took a writing class that required keeping a dream journal for the entire semester, and it started a lifelong practice of tracking my dreams in journals, stories, and in my paintings.

Recently, while working on a series of large-scale drawings I had a dream that I was at a tea party with my grandmother and apropos of nothing she stopped in mid-conversation with her neighbor, Mrs. Shields, turned to me and said: a straight line is the truth and a curved one is freedom, and then went back to listening to Mrs. Shields talk about how her chickens kept getting out of their pen.

My work nearly always begins with a line, followed by another, and another: some lines intersect, others follow each other, and still others move along on their own singular course and destination. I imagine that these lines are maps of my own journeys, that they are reporting back from the places I’ve been, the transitions I’ve experienced, the external worlds that I’ve seen and the internal ones I’ve created—and how I’ve observed them all. 

For me, lines describe so very many things—yes, they are energy in all their movement—and they are also often represent the mystifying polarities of this world, of my world. They intersect and disappear, divide and measure, they possess the ability to both arrive and depart, seduce and repel, define and obscure, create language and rest in silence. 

It’s taken years, no, decades of practice for me to learn that when I allow the line to pull me, instead of attempting to push it, when I trust the gesture in all its spontaneity, that is the work where I find the truth and, my freedom.