Elizabeth Nelson

The landscape in Vermont is central to my sense of place and it is part of my identity. The comfortable view of mowed fields, healthy farms and barns in good repair, small villages nestled among the pastures and woods is now threatened by encroaching development, difficult economic realities for farms and villages and by climate change. I want to make people aware of this everyday beauty, to treasure and guard it and not allow it to slip away through carelessness or greed.

I have been part of the working landscape of Vermont for forty years, raising children, gardens, chickens and sheep. I have been a dairy farmer, starting with ten heifers and ending with three hundred cows twenty seven years later. And since I was six years old I have been painting. My work has evolved to be a kind of record of the northern farm landscape which challenges us with harsh weather, extremes of temperature and the long duration of a difficult climate, but it also rewards us with extraordinary beauty. I believe this beauty is what inspires us who live here to endure, do the work, and even prosper.

The approaches and mediums I have used are varied: abstractions, photo realism, emotional realism expressed in several scales in oils, acrylics and water colors. By building outward from the specific image/landscape, the particular experience is intensified by expansion. It can be biographical or fictional; either way, it is a search for meaning.