I am a visual story-teller. I make pictures of everyday life, of the quotidian world, of people, places and things; situations at once familiar to many, but singular in their specificity. The particulars reflect my vision and experience but welcomes the viewer in with empathy. I look to make seen the unseen, to bring the poignancy of our awareness to the ordinary. My imagery develops from observation and my personal daily cell-phone photography note-taking. I have always been taken by the informal, and cinematographic aspect of modernist representation; the personal, subjective gaze.

Drawing is my first language. From my childhood, drawing and the vitality of the handed mark have anchored my art practice; my earliest memories are of drawing on the backs of the lab notes my father gave his chemistry students. One of ten children, my siblings and I drew our way through our childhood. The power of telling a story through drawing remains magical for me.

As a representational image-maker, I work two-dimensionally with paint, drawing materials, collage and print-making, within a painterly realist vernacular, an active drawn line and open brush stroke.  Although my images are often illusionistic, I seek to stay connected to their objectness. There is something wonderfully compelling about the puzzle of representation, the satisfaction of creating that feeling of dimension, of the equivalent of what is seen and felt, that I deeply enjoy. But I also love to play with the reading of space and surface, to flatten out, abstract, and otherwise alter spatial illusion. I take a lot of inspiration from early modernist experiments with figure/ground and picture plane reading from the post-impressionists to the cubists, and graphic arts from the fin de siècle to the 1960s. I frequently use collage and collage syntax as both a picture building device and an interruption of illusion.
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[Elizabeth is] a skillful artist whose work brings light to any setting. ....
The richness of color and the orchestration of groups of people and scenes are fresh and full of life!
                                                                                                                                  —Carol Saft