Biography
Elizabeth Dworkin is a painter who lives in New York City. She graduated from Cornell University with a BFA in 1965. She moved to Boston, Mass, where she became involved with an active group of like-minded artists, who were determined to create a conducive atmosphere and market for contemporary, abstract art in Boston. Through their passion and efforts, they founded the Boston Visual Artists Union, and pressured both the Institute of Contemporary Art, and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts into expanding and supporting their own exhibitions and departments of contemporary art.
From about 1971-1995, she was a highly sought after teacher, throughout the East Coast University system, teaching painting and drawing to graduate and undergraduate students, from Mass. College of Art, Brown University, Rhode Island School of Design, Princeton University, to Florida International University, and many places in between. She was a lecturer all over the country, and was a Juror for the Ohio Arts Council in 1984 & 1990.
In 1980, she moved to New York to further her career and face more challenging circumstances. She has showed in NYC consistently since then, and finds the atmosphere stimulating and productive. She has one son.
Artist’s Statement
“We have come into the world in order to understand certain things. Only a few things, very few, but exceedingly important…Art is a meeting place. Of the author and the object of his love, of spirit and matter, of truth and fantasy, of the line traced by a pencil, the contour of a body, of one word with another. These meetings are rare, unexpected. ‘Is that you?’ ‘Is it you?’ Recognizing each other, both parties are seized by a frenzy, and clasp hands. In these gestures of surprise and joy we see art.”
-Saul Bellow, To Jerusalem and Back
“…all arts aspire to music, which is pure form. Music, states of happiness, mythology, faces belabored by time, certain twilights and certain places try to tell us something, or have said something we should not have missed, or are about to say something; this imminence of a revelation which does not occur is, perhaps, the aesthetic phenomenon.”
-Jorge L. Borges, The Wall and the Books
These two statements, both by writers, describe the feelings I reach for while painting; the sense that something will change on the canvas, the paint has just alighted where we find it, and could turn. I’m interested in the caught moment, the held breath. Landscape, place, the way the air feels there, the light that is about to move on; these things are my main inspiration, certainly. But it’s not their depiction I care about. It’s their contradictions. It’s stillness and activity and back again. Color is my way of containing contradiction, of defying apparent logic. Less the push and pull of visual activity and more the holding still within a place.