Elizabeth Talbot - Visual Artist

Elizabeth was born in 1951, brought up in the Yorkshire countryside, and has lived in the North East for the last 35 years. Despite early inclinations to become an artist, Elizabeth trained as a social worker and worked full time as a social worker for 18 years whilst raising her two children. She then took the opportunity to return to her first love and attended Newcastle University where she obtained a BA and then a Masters degree in Fine Art, graduating in September 2004.

Elizabeth now has a studio in Newcastle and continues to support herself through part time social work.

Elizabeth’s primary practice is painting, often on a large scale, but her repertoire also includes drawing, and making prints from etchings and wood engravings. Over the last few years her focus has been on the landscape. A sense of loss and longing is the starting point for her evocative and haunting images. Elizabeth is interested in fusing together the language of romanticism with personal memory of being in the landscape. Her aim is not to represent a particular place but rather to evoke an emotional response, whilst allowing the viewer to project their own feelings and memories into the paintings.

Elizabeth begins by using found images from, for example, travel books that provide typical ‘scenes’ of beauty spots. To this extent the imagery is impersonal and predetermined. She deliberately chooses poor quality or old black and white photographs that provide just enough information for her to project her own memories and feelings into their translation into paint. In addition, sources as diverse as romantic and baroque painting, digital imagery, cinematic film or fairy-tale illustrations all feed into the work.

Elizabeth has exhibited in a number of group exhibitions including the Atkinson Gallery, Somerset in 2002, the Red Box Gallery in Newcastle in 2003, the Shire Pottery Gallery in Alnwick in 2004/5 and in the Albemarle Gallery in London in 2005.

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