Elizabeth Torak Email and Phone Number

I began my career as a representational artist devoted to Old Master technique. For decades I honed my skill in rendering color, form, and light on canvas. The canvas itself was Belgian linen that I carefully prepared by hand with layers of rabbit-skin glue and white lead; I also ground my own paint and prepared mediums and varnishes. With these beautiful materials I painted luminous still lifes, landscapes and figure paintings. As my vision grew, I deployed paint in increasingly complex harmonies and delved deeper and deeper into artistic space. This phase of my work culminated in a monumental oil, the 5’ x 9’ Feast of Venus I, a complex figure piece on the theme of women, food, and creativity. In 2011 this painting was the centerpiece of a solo exhibit, The Feast of Venus I: The Artist’s Process at the Wilson Museum in Manchester, Vermont. The exhibit included eight oil studies and thirty-seven preparatory drawings. The Feast of Venus I was the subject of a feature article in October 2012 issue of The Artist’s Magazine.Even as I worked on the Feast of Venus, a new vision was developing in my work. In 2010 the complex color harmonies I had been working with moved directly from the palette to the canvas and I began to paint semi-abstractions. This new body of work is based on a perception of the world as a matrix of vibrations in which solidity of form is an illusion. Employing the same level of craftsmanship as my representational work, these pieces shimmer with energy.Today I enjoy a sense of freedom from the restriction of classifying myself as either a realist or abstract painter. I have confidence in my ability to move fluidly from realism to abstraction and back again – often within the same painting. My style of painting, a style which juxtaposes and interweaves these different traditions of visual language, provides me with the perfect metaphor for my perception of reality as an infinite and mysterious construction of differing paradigms.