Liz Carney

About

Willard Beach
photo by Peter DuCharme

I have been inspired by Provincetown's landscape for my entire life. As a child my mother, and artist and art teacher, took us here for summers. Later, in my twenties, I began my career as an artist, showing in Provincetown galleries and studying painting with artists in the community.

Over the past thirty years as a painter, I recorded the changing Provincetown waterfront and later shifted my gaze away from the harbor to record more organic and internal landscapes. In the early works of industrial waterfront imagery, the subject matter of fishing vessels and boatyards possessed a lure of strength and power. In the later half of my painting career, the works have focused on organic subjects, yet they retain an underlying structure I had observed in the architecture of the boats and shipyards. These paintngs often straddle conventional notions of representation and abstraction. I have become interested in the inherent ambiguity and complexity of living things versus the man made objects of my past works. They are more emotional works and they skew our understanding of the real and the abstract. 

From my earlier industrial waterfront paintings to the more recent gardens, the imagery delivers an intensified experience of color and the impact of complex space. I work on both canvas and panels and the paintings are heavily impastoed with wax and oil. My marks are made with knife and brush. I am greatly interested in the process of painting and in what paint can do.