About Elizabeth

Growing up in a family of artists, Elizabeth was encouraged to draw and paint from an early age. While still in high school, she was invited to attend art classes on a scholarship to Chouinard Fine Art School in Los Angeles. She then traveled abroad to study at Sir John Cass College of Art and Heatherley School of Art in London. Heatherley was a small traditional art guild her mother had attended.

Returning to the States, she continued her studies at the Arts Students League in New York City, then apprenticed with Larry Gluck where she says she learned the technical side of visual communication. Since then, she has studied with other renowned artists such as Quang Ho, Ron Hicks, Kim English, Michael Lynch, Helen Van Wyk, to name a few.

Elizabeth has been the owner of an art school in Austin for nearly four decades, and has developed a teaching style that has helped hundreds of people to draw and paint beautifully. Much can be learned from going back in history, to put back into art education what has been left out over time. Elizabeth explains it this way, "There is a technical side to drawing and painting. When learned, this language can free the artist within. Being moved by the beauty of what we find before us is not necessarily enough. Once this language of visual communication is learned, then we have a means through which to communicate and express what we feel. Paradoxically, once we have the technical skills, then there can be a ‘leap into the unknown’ allowing what can never be planned or known to emerge. We ‘let go' of trying to 'do' art, and what emerges is fresh and natural and authentic. Art can be a place where we can simply and truly and courageously ‘show up’ and be ourselves. Art is the result of mastering the skills, and then getting the head out of the way, and letting the heart take over."  

For several summers, Elizabeth and some of her students traveled to France to paint outdoors together. "There is no substitute for painting directly from life. When we are in direct relationship with Nature, responding to the lighting and colors, in the ‘present’, we are not only experiencing and witnessing Nature, but also participating in the glory of it all!" The resultant work has attracted the attention of collectors across the nation.

After forty wonderful years of teaching the Art Study Program at Austin Fine Art Classes in Austin Texas, Elizabeth is now teaching the Art Study Program in Wimberley Texas where she now lives.