Bio

Elizabeth Livingston was born in Miami, Florida in 1979. She is a painter primarily working in oil on canvas.  Livingston majored in Fine Art at Yale University in 2001, and then went on to complete her MFA at Boston University in 2006.  She has been represented by Alpha Gallery in Boston since earning her MFA. Livingston has been the recipient of several residency and fellowship awards, including Ucross in Wyoming, Weir Farm in Connecticut, a full Fellowship to the Vermont Studio Center, and the Aljira Emerge program in New Jersey.   She had her first solo museum show at the University of Maine’s Zillman Art Museum in 2015 and her work has been widely collected throughout the U.S.  Her shows have been reviewed in The New York Times, The Boston Globe and the Huffington Post.  She lives and works in Pelham, NY.

Artist’s Statement

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 as wallpaper or 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’ve always been interested in 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.  My most recent body of work, “Understory” adds to this theme, an exploration of how we exist in the world below the canopy - tiny in our universe, surrounded by an otherworldly landscape.  Peering up through leaves overhead reveals a kaleidoscope of green stars, cloud formations loom like creatures in the distance on a sweltering afternoon, a day moon floats alone and surreal in a bright blue sky, a tiny plane soars overhead at dusk, and suburban nightscapes show cozy houses lit like jewels in the dark.  The figures in this body of work, exist in indoor night scenes, where nature creeps in through patterns and at the edges -- a palm leaf motif on a skirt, forest wallpaper, and hulking houseplants.  Alone at night, the women dive into other worlds through a book, a letter, a laptop, buoyed by patterns and bathed in soft light.  These delicate constructed spaces below the treetops are fragile bubbles on a planet that burns from climate change, weathers a global pandemic, and is ravaged by violence and greed – they are both beautiful and terribly alone.