Bio
Elisa holds a BFA in painting from Northern Illinois University. Residencies include Anderson Ranch Art Center in Snowmass, Colorado and The Red Brick Art Center in Aspen, Colorado. She has taught drawing, painting, and writing to children and adults at the Red Brick Center for the Arts in Aspen, Colorado, the San Luis Obispo Art Museum in California and the Rockford Art Museum in Illinois. Her work was included in the 2018 Dubuque Museum of Art Biennial, the 2020 Rockford Art Museum Midwestern Biennial and in 2023, the Wright Museum of Art at Beloit College in Wisconsin. She currently lives and works in Leaf River, Illinois.
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Artist Statement
I use an inward perspective of experience and work with images from dreams and from the “wakeful dreaming” states of meditation and daydreams. Oil paintings, watercolor, and pinhole photography are the settings for these personal mythologies and fairytales. Mostly based in the natural world, the images are like a shamanic bridge between the real and ethereal, the natural and supernatural and help give meaning to these mysterious spaces. Themes of place emerge. Places of longing, grief, loneliness, and within these struggles finding places of beauty and hope.
