Elizabeth Livingston
Gallery Affiliations: Alpha Gallery
Region: Northeast
Website: http://www.elizabethlivingston.com
City / State: Pelham , NY
I primarily paint lone women in domestic environments in an effort to express my ideas about human isolation and vulnerability in our modern world. I work from photographs that I stage and shoot myself, and some elements, such an intricately patterned garment, are painted from life. To give the image a charge of disturbance, the viewpoint is often that of an outsider looking in, throwing the viewer into the position of voyeur. I am interested in using portraiture and narrative threads as a means of exploring how fragile we are despite the ways we buffer ourselves from the outside world, with soft quilts, richly patterned wallpaper, or by leaving a light on at night while we sleep. More recently, my work is pulling in the natural world to depict how tiny we are in our universe, surrounded by an otherworldly landscape. Curtains of whispering leaves, a tiny plane soaring overhead at dusk, and suburban nightscapes with their cozy houses lit like jewels, highlight the fragility of these delicate constructed spaces below the treetops.