Bio
Elizabeth Wolf works with paint to create psychedelic figurative paintings that are loaded with emotion and color. Her realistic scenes capture the psychology of the figure through expression, body language, and her use of light. Born and raised in Louisville Kentucky, she studied art at the University of Louisville and graduated with a BFA with a focus in painting, and a minor in Psychology. She has participated in juried exhibitions such as the ones provided by LexArts in Lexington Kentucky as well as some local showings put together by fellow artists in Louisville such as ones that take place at the Mammoth.
Light Series
Her BFA thesis exhibition in Spring 2018, focused on light. This series of psychological figurative paintings explores how light and vision affect and deceive our constructions of human experience. Western cultures perceptually rely on sight above other sense, ocularcentrism, which like memory can be faulty, deceptive, and biased. More and more our environments are affected by light from screens and technology. In several of the paintings figures gaze off the canvas into a light source, presumably a screen, that casts a tinted glow on their form. The dramatic high contrast lighting and colors abstracted from reality distort the figure, referencing similarly the way our experiences and memories are distorted. However, the colored light also blankets the figures and their surroundings, unifying them and suggesting a sense of interconnectedness. The light distorts the imagery, highlighting the unreliability of vision, and also links the figure to its environment. Yet, despite this connection with the environment, each figure in this series is isolated, creating and opposing force and a human non human interaction on the canvas. This theme of isolation and solidarity of the figures is a reference to the growing epidemic of social isolation: that we are both more interconnected and more alone. Using the figure in this series represents the humanity of our worldly experiences, ones that rely heavily on the way vision constructs and alters our perception of reality.