About Elizabeth Harris
Elizabeth Harris lives and works in Southern California. She paints and sculpts largely in encaustic. Harris uses nontraditional techniques to achieve a rugged elegance. Her goal is to reveal the hand of the maker and show the passage of time.
Harris is a recipient of the Berkshire Taconic Foundation's A.R.T. Fund but is largely self-taught in the arts. Although a physician by training, she has painted and drawn all of her life. She’s taken numerous art classes and workshops.
Her work has been the subject of numerous solo and group exhibitions, and is held in several international collections.
Reviews
Wire and Grit
by David Raymond
Director of McCoy Gallery and Professor of Fine Arts Merrimack College
Elizabeth Harris' encaustic panels are sites of engagement between trails of moving points (lines) with layered surfaces (planes). The layers of beeswax form a geology of milky surfaces and depths that receive and secure her drawing marks and incisions. Line does not simply rest on surface: it changes the character of surface by removing its anonymity. It might be said that as the artist draws or scribbles across and into the wax, she imparts a code of signals that, although like writing, lack the expected transparency of language.
If Harris is painting language, it is a language best experienced as something non-verbal and non-aural. It is a language of charged points that move and leave trails, that loop and swirl in ways that suggest miniature dancers whose actions leave expanding residues of their presence- residues that achieve the status of lingering history. In this sense the panels are both stage and page-like, full of textual gesture. The gestures of the marking hand are flashpoints and releases of self experience, like neural signals that drag interior vitality to public presence.
Making art is giving visibility. Harris' art does not repeat in any exact way the visible world we already know. It recalls that world- her scrawled marks certainly resemble writing and sometimes include small diagrams of "things" along with scratched-out writing and numbering. Legibility almost sets in. Intention paired with obliteration offers contrasting impulses. Large, curling forms become chains that twist and screech- an expressive syntax formed of wire and grit tornadoes. Some marks hurry-up through space, others pause and dissolve down into the wax. Space is worked with energy, doubt, and assertion. Marks are committed and committed to. This is painting as risk-taking and as improvisation, the quality of a conversation that only dares honesty.
That the paintings are monochromatic- whites, grays and blacks occasionally tinged with bits of amber- gives drawing a dominant role. It is what we attend to as we "read" the imagery. But the wax layers themselves very slowly receive our own presence as we view them. They invite us under their surfaces much the way a lake draws the eye into its depths. There are no passive spaces. In this sense Harris may be engaged in an ambitious project of proclaiming the worth of the fully realized object. Since these objects are so insistently quirky, we may at first see them as the products of antic behavior. However that quirky appearance is quite central to their lack of pretense in favor of what can be called joyous provocation.
The Incisive Line
by Joanne Mattera
Director, International Encaustic Conference, 2015
Harris, whose process is notational and whose concerns are related to language as well as science and spirituality, employs mark making in a way that is as much drawing as painting. Certainly she calls to mind Twombly with her cursive scrawls, but there is transcendence at work here: the poetry of ideas in an achromatic palette.