Greygreen
Painting
Year: 2021
Edition: Unique
Technique: Acrylic on canvas on board
Framed: No
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AUTHENTICITY
All artworks on IdeelArt are original, signed, delivered directly from the artist's studio, and come with a certificate of authenticity.Elizabeth Gourlay is an American abstract artist whose work emerges from a progressive process of layering colour, lines and forms, informed both by inner emotional states and her observation of nature and architecture. She lives and works in Chester (CT).
Gourlay’s work is featured in various private and corporate collections including The Lewitt Collection, The Marriott Family and Yale University. She is the recipient of several grants and fellowships, including two Individual Artist State Grants from the DECD/Connecticut Office of the Arts. In 2011 she was an invited artist in residence at the studio of Sol LeWitt, Spoleto, Italy.
Elizabeth Gourlay uses a wide range of media such as oil, flashe, acrylic, ink and graphite to create artfully simple and strong compositions.
Gourlay thinks of her work as a meditation on colour and form, a gradual yet progressive study leading to a complex vocabulary of shapes, colour and line. "The shapes and lines create my own vocabulary of abstract forms."
Musical composition, emotional states and our collective subconscious resonate within bars, lines and blocks of colour. The abstract forms emerge, layer and shift in precisely ordered, carefully composed rhythms. The artist contemplates the elements that make colour in reduced forms come to life: size, flatness, relation to its edges, and how the presence of other colors affect how it is perceived.
Gourlay draws inspiration from shapes found in everyday life and in her studio. The observed shapes either remain as they are or become simplified to their essential geometric elements. Subtleties in colour, area, edge or orientation are the catalyst for emotive responses. A broad range of colours are explored and then reduced an essential and sometimes interactive palette. Gourlay investigates colour properties: complementary or analogous, value, saturation and colour harmony vs. colour anomaly.
Gourlay cites past masters from Anni Albers, to Agnes Martin to Ellsworth Kelly as important influences. Her work is similarly focused on reducing artistic elements to their essential forms. The results are strong and distinctly emotive pieces that breathe and vibrate and remain open for the viewer to discover feeling and interpret meaning.
Elizabeth Gourlay was an American abstract artist whose work emerged from a progressive process of layering colour, lines and forms, informed both by inner emotional states and her observation of nature and architecture. She lived and worked in Chester (CT).
Education
Elizabeth Gourlay studied Drawing and Painting at the Edinburgh College of Art in Scotland where she graduated in 1983. She then went to Yale University School of Art (CT) where she earned an MFA in Painting.
Technique
Elizabeth Gourlay used a wide range of media such as oil, flashe, acrylic, ink and graphite to create artfully simple and strong compositions.
Her work usually began with layering washes of colours, then followed by drawing elements. The colours were sharply and fully selected, using a wide range of colour palettes from almost monochromatic to greatly polychromatic.
Her paintings are metaphorical: some of her pieces allude to science by illustrating experiments with coordinate planes and bar graphs. Some refer to music with shapes defining sound and colour defining volume. Furthermore, some paintings suggest history and culture with covering layers of apparent worn or shredded paper.
Inspiration
Gourlay thought of her work as a meditation on colours, lines and forms, leading to a complex network of shifting shapes and colours. "The shapes and lines create my own vocabulary of abstract forms."...
She had a particular interest in elements found in nature, architecture and music, drawing lines, grids and geometric shapes to demonstrate it. Indeed, her work is often described by its musicality and architectonic connotations.
The use of line suggests influences from Agnes Martin while her play of colour reminds Paul Klee's work. Her compositions deal with order and chaos using line, colour and shape.
Collections
Gourlay's work is featured in various private and corporate collections including The Lewitt Collection, The Marriott Family and Yale University.
Exhibitions
Elizabeth Gourlay has extensively exhibited in solo and group shows on the US East Coast.
Galleries
Gourlay worked with a number of american galleries during her career, including more recently Kenise Barnes Fine Art (Kent, CT) and Cynthia Winings Gallery (Blue Hill, ME). Ideelart has been representing her work since 2016.
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