Liz Dwyer is a New Jersey based artist currently living and working in Hardwick, NJ. She studied art and art history at Radford University in Virginia and Middlesex University in London, England. Liz later completed graduate studies at Montclair State University in Art Education. She is self taught as a painter but has worked in a variety of other mediums and has facilitated many levels of art instruction.
Her current paintings are latex on wood. In 2017, Liz took an interest in barn quilts painted on wood, occasionally seeing them in her surrounding rural landscape as they made their way toward the east coast from the midwest. She found them breathtaking and fiercely competitive against the raw beauty of nature with their juxtaposed geometric arrangements. Liz began experimenting and painting her own barn quilts using modern fabric quilting and its feminine history as her inspiration while taking a deconstructive or minimalist approach. Painting on wood quickly gained her admiration and brought her in a new direction. Wood offered a warm, saturated, and organic quality that she had not found in other painting surfaces.
Liz describes some of her paintings on wood as modern folk art. Her work has since evolved and become a culmination of attractions that pull from modern abstraction, symbolism, cultural patterns, geographical influences, with a minimalist approach. Her newest work includes a developing series of figure paintings that explore personal identity, female identity, and motherhood. Liz has also begun to depict the collapsing barns and farm dwellings that surround her home in rural Northwestern NJ. She often isolates them in an imagined landscape and finds painting and memorializing them on wood, the same weathering material they were built with years ago, feels significant.
