ABOUT THE ARTIST
Biography
Liz Riegel is an Oil Painter with a deep passion for education and making art accessible to people from all walks of life. In high school, she left her legacy by teaching painting classes for the youth of Rocky Mount, North Carolina. In college, Liz pursued a degree in Fine Arts with a concentration in Oil Painting. At the start of Covid, she paused her education and has since worked across the East Coast as an Arts Instructor, mentor, and professional. Liz has served as a mentor for the Durham Art Guild and Student-U, a resident Golden Belts Artist, and a community programs coordinator across the triangle. Her work has carried her most recently to Chicago, IL where she intends to continue creating creative programming across the city.
ARTIST STATEMENT
When I was young, my first artistic endeavors were extensions of the things I felt were missing in myself. Growing up in a strict, authoritarian religion, I never seemed to fit the mold I was placed into. I began creating art as a way to give shape to the things I could not express and to explore the parts of myself I did not yet understand. That instinct still guides my work today. My oil paintings and collages explore themes of mental health, religious trauma, queerness, and authenticity.
I use the figure as a way to explore the relationship between the physical body and the internal self. At the heart of my work is the belief that we all carry pain with varying levels of visibility. I use pattern, color and symbolism to explore this idea. I paint and collage humanity unburdened by physical and mental barriers. This tension between rigidity and tenderness in the figures allows them to exist somewhere between what is presented outwardly and what is experienced internally. Much of my work is paired with free-verse poetry. These poems are wonderings that inform the pieces they accompany, giving language to some of the questions that cannot be answered through paint alone. I am not interested in providing a single answer, but rather in creating a place where these ponderings are visible.