Day 97/100: Elizabeth Sullivan
Encouraging a Mixed-Media Artist Who is Always Evolving in the Way She Communicates Beauty and Memory
Today, as part of my 100 Days of Encouragement Project, I’m celebrating mixed-media artist Elizabeth Sullivan, who has fearlessly embraced her artistic learning journey.
Born and raised in Auckland, NZ, Elizabeth developed a longing for travel. After training as a paralegal, she left NZ bound for the UK and Europe. On her grand adventure, she met her husband, and they settled in Australia in 2004. Today, she lives and works in Sydney, creating art and parenting her 3 children (ages 10 to 18).
Her passion for color and pattern began as a child. Her mother and grandmother passed on a love of beautiful things, and she carried on their legacy through drawing, painting, collaging, stitching and dabbling in different crafts.
In her 40s, when her middle child was at pre-school, she decided to take a watercolour and mixed media course — and she was smitten. She experimented in that style for quite a few years, just for fun and relaxation, until her youngest started school, and she had more time to devote to developing a committed art practice.
For her, painting is a form of self-expression and a response to the elements of beauty she sees in everyday life. She feels fortunate to have traveled extensively, where her love of beautiful objects, nature, landscapes, patterns, textiles, and furnishings has been nurtured. All of these fascinations influence her artwork.
She has become attuned to the world as an endless source of wonder. So a fallen blossom on the pavement, the feeling of walking along the beach, the texture and pattern of tree bark, or a piece of treasured crockery could suddenly present themselves as inspirations. In responding to these prompts, Elizabeth hopes to tell a story through layers of water-based media, fibers, and notions.
She loves working in watercolor, gouache, ink, acrylic, pen, collage, stitching and textiles, mixing the mediums intuitively to create a sense of texture, movement, and mood. One of the benefits of being primarily self-taught is that Elizabeth doesn’t feel stifled by the academic rules. She’s free to experiment, flow from one medium and format to another, and maintain a sense of joy and playfulness in her process. Her work, largely abstracted, often evokes landscapes — but what a range of styles she has at her disposal!
She seems to have fearlessly embraced the heart of a lifelong learner, allowing herself to experiment and take risks. She may start with something relatively conventional — a painting that is nice enough as it is — and then pull out her threads and needles and sequins and beads and start working into the painted surface to see what happens.
Or she may try her hand at a new genre and post her efforts, even when she’s not altogether pleased with the results — because learning requires the permission to not already know how to do something. Her courage to show us what it looks like to evolve and stretch is a beautiful permission slip for other emerging artists who have been seduced by the Comparison Gremlins into falsely thinking that “talented” people don’t have to go through the challenging “messy middle” of things.
What began as a hobby has evolved into Elizabeth fulfilling her dream of working as an artist from her home studio.
In June 2021, when Sydney went into COVID lockdown for nearly 5 months, Elizabeth’s daughter was home-schooling with her in the studio. So she decided to paint primarily on 12 x 12 inch ply boards, giving herself no restriction on subject, with the freedom to paint whatever she felt like, on any given day. She set some parameter about working in a limited color palette, and she found the process excellent for understanding how colors worked together to achieve harmony.
I discovered Elizabeth’s artwork just a few days after I had purchased a small sewing machine to take to my studio. I had been having inklings about experimenting with incorporating fabrics and stitching into my work, but was feeling daunted at how to begin. So encountering Elizabeth’s process — and courage — felt like a little gift and wink from God. So I am grateful to this lovely creative from the other side of the globe.
How You Be an Encouragement
Please check out Elizabeth’s offerings on Instagram and her website, follow her, and send her some encouragement today by commenting on one of her posts or sending her a direct message.
Instagram: @elizabethsullivanart
Website: www.elizabethsullivanart.com