The landscape in Vermont is central to Elizabeth's sense of place and it is part of her identity. The comfrotable 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. Elizabeth strives to make people aware of this everday beauty, to treasure and guard it and not allow it to slip away through carelessness or greed. Elizabeth has been part of the working landscape of Vermont for forty years, raising children, gardens, chickens and sheep. She has been a dairy farmer, starting with ten heifers and ending with three hundred cows twenty-seven years later. She has been painting since she was six years old. Her 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. She believes, these beauties are what inspires us who live here to endure, do the work, and even prosper. The approaches and mediums she has used over her long career 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.
