About the Artist
Elizabeth Wilson is a representational painter based in Philadelphia. Her paintings have often been described as small gems, luminous and having a quiet energy.
Her work has been exhibited extensively throughout the United States, including the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the National Academy of Design, The Butler Institute of American Art, Asheville Art Museum, Allentown Art Museum, Woodmere Art Museum, Noyes Museum, and the Southern Alleghenies Museum of Art, among many others. She has been represented by numerous galleries including Gallery Henoch (New York), More Gallery, Gross McCleaf Gallery, Marian Locks Gallery (Philadelphia), Muliigan-Shenoski Gallery (San Francisco), Morpeth Gallery (New Jersey), among others. Her work is held in numerous public and private collections that include the Woodmere Art Museum, The State Museum of Pennsylvania, Southern Alleghenies Museum of Art, The Art Bank Collection of the U.S. State Department, the Pennsylvania Convention Center Art Collection, Bryn Mawr College and McGraw Hill Publishing Company, many others. Private collections include Ronald Lee Fleming (urban planner, designer, author and preservationist, founder of The Townscape Institute), filmmaker, director and producer Sir Ridley Scott, the late Jerry & Marian Locks (Marian Locks Gallery, Philadelphia), among many others. In 2022 a solo museum exhibition of 30 paintings was held at the Southern Alleghenies Museum of Art (Pennsylvania). In 2009 a Retrospective exhibition of her work spanning three decades was held at the Lawrence Gallery at Rosemont College in Pennsylvania. Reviews, profiles and interviews of her work have appeared in The Philadelphia Inquirer, ARTnews Magazine, Painting Perceptions, Philadelphia Magazine, Jewish Exponent, Catamaran Literary Magazine and Canvas Rebel Magazine, among others. She had been a long time arts educator at several universities and colleges and local art centers in Philadelphia and invited to teach workshops at The Art Students League (New York) and JSS in Civita (Jerusalem Studio School / Italy), where she also had an Artist Residency.
While a student at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA), Elizabeth studied with Joe Amarotico, Arthur DeCosta, Sidney Goodman, Tony Greenwood, Homer Johnson, Ben Kamihira, Jimmy Lueders, Elizabeth Osborne, Bruce Samuelson, Lou Sloan, Roswell Weidner, among others.
Primarily a painter of landscape, she is also known for her figurative work. Her work has always been a direct response to her environment, largely inspired by travel. She works from a combination of direct observation, memory, visual reference (studies, sketches, photographs) and imagination. Her work embodies a strong sense of time, place and visual harmony achieved in part through careful editing and at times shifting towards abstraction. She has also created a large body of work inspired from her hometown of Philadelphia and surrounding communities.
Her series of small paintings began in the mid 1990’s when she returned to England as a working artist, and when she first began working with gouache. Her first visit to the UK was twenty years earlier which cemented her preoccupation with the British landscape and would ultimately change the trajectory of her work over the following decades. She returned to the UK frequently for visual stimulation, inspiration and subject matter; visiting art museums, historical and archeological sites, discovering small villages and their dramatic surrounding topographies. She has painted in Northumberland, in and around London, the Cotswold’s, Great Malvern, the Lake District, Wales, and from the nearby regions of Scotland, particularly outside Glasgow and Ireland. Other places lived or explored that were fertile sources of inspiration or subject matter include parts of Europe, the Middle East, Nova Scotia, California, Florida, New Jersey, New York (particularly the North Fork & Hamptons), Maine, Martha’s Vineyard, Rhode Island (Newport) and her hometown of Philadelphia where she lives and works.
To view selected examples of her paintings, click on the artwork menu above.
