About the Artist
ELIZABETH WILSON is a representational painter based in Philadelphia, best known for her intimate gouache landscapes of the British Isles. Her paintings have been described as small gems, luminous and having a quiet energy. Predominantly a landscape painter, she has also worked extensively with the figure and still life.
Elizabeth is a graduate of Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and attended the Corcoran School of Art and University of Pennsylvania. She has exhibited extensively throughout the United States in curated, juried and solo exhibitions, including a 2022 solo museum exhibition at the Southern Alleghenies Museum of Art. Her work has been included in exhibitions at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, National Academy of Design, Butler Institute of American Art, Asheville Art Museum, among others.
Gallery representation has included Werring Contemporary (Devon, PA), Gallery Henoch (New York), More Gallery, Gross McCleaf Gallery, Marian Locks Gallery, F.A.N. Gallery (Philadelphia), Muliigan-Shenoski Gallery (San Francisco), Morpeth Gallery (New Jersey), among others.
Wilson’s work is held in numerous public collections throughout the United States including the Woodmere Art Museum, Southern Alleghenies Museum of Art, The State Museum of Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania Convention Center Art Collection, Bryn Mawr College and McGraw Hill Publishing Company. Her work is held in numerous private collections throughout the United States and the United Kingdom including the collections of Ronald Lee Fleming (urban planner, designer, author and preservationist and founder of The Townscape Institute), Sir Ridley Scott (filmmaker, director and producer), Eric Bazilian (singer, songwriter and founding member of The Hooters), Marian Locks (the late founder of Marian Locks Gallery, Philadelphia), among many others.
Reviews, interviews and profiles of her work have appeared in printed and online publications including The Philadelphia Inquirer, ARTnews Magazine, Painting Perceptions, Philadelphia Magazine, Stories from PAFA, Fine Art Connoisseur Magazine, Catamaran Arts & Literature Magazine, The Jewish Exponent, John Thornton films, among others.
She had been a longtime arts educator at several universities and colleges and local art centers in Philadelphia and was invited to teach workshops at the Art Students League of New York and JSS in Civita in Italy, where she also had an artists residency.
While a student at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA) in Philadelphia she 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.
Her series of small landscape paintings began in the mid 1990’s when she returned to England as a working artist and when she began working with gouache. Her first visit to the UK twenty years earlier 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 Midlands, the Lake District, parts of Wales, near Glasgow (Scotland) 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.
