LIZ CARNEY

She has been inspired by Provincetown's landscape for her entire life. As a child her mother, an artist and art teacher, took her here for summers. Later, in her twenties, she began her career as an artist, showing in Provincetown galleries and studying painting with artists in the community. Over the past thirty years as a painter, she recorded the changing Provincetown waterfront and later shifted her gaze away from the harbor to record more organic and internal landscapes. In the early works of industrial waterfront imagery, the subject matter of fishing vessels and boatyards possessed a lure of strength and power. In the later half of her painting career, the works have focused on organic subjects, yet they retain an underlying structure she had observed in the architecture of the boats and shipyards. These paintings often straddle conventional notions of representation and abstraction. She has become interested in the inherent ambiguity and complexity of living things versus the man made objects of her past works. They are more emotional works and they skew our understanding of the real and the abstract.

From her earlier industrial waterfront paintings to the more recent gardens, the imagery delivers an intensified experience of color and the impact of complex space. She works on both canvas and panels and the paintings are heavily impastoed with wax and oil. Her marks are made with knife and brush. She is greatly interested in the process of painting and in what paint can do. She is a woman.