Artist Elizabeth Richards is now exhibiting at The World’s Smallest Art Gallery

Elizabeth Richards is exhibiting at The World’s Smallest Art Gallery* through June 12, 2015.

Elizabeth Richards is a traditional artist currently residing in Narragansett. Most Elizabeth’s work deals with subjects from nature such as different plants, animals, and sometimes figures and settings to create various scenes with a multitude of symbolism generally involving different cultures’ religions, beliefs, myths, and spirituality.

It’s the idea of spirituality and not necessarily religion that she finds interesting. Elizabeth looks through various peoples ranging from Northern Pacific Inuit, Navajo tribes, Greek and Egyptian mythologies, and even modern day movements, such as the punk rebellion, to create a scene and narrative.  Recently she has been focusing on astrology and instances of rare happenings in nature such as albinism, melanism, and different subspecies and what they could possibly represent.  She then creates newer mythologies of her own with them.

Elizabeth describes her creative process as a chaotic one. She starts by picking one specific story, idea, animal, or any other element to focus on then focuses on the story and the meaning behind the myth.  It is then that the rest of the elements fall into place. Elizabeth feels that while it is important to create a structurally sound painting, her first goal is to create the story she wants to tell.  She states “My brain picks up the information, melds it with other ideas and pieces, creating a snowball effect leading to the end product of a sometimes surreal whole. Sometimes what I set out to do in the beginning is not what I end up with when the paint is good and dry.” Another of Elizabeth’s goals is high key color saturation and textures.

Elizabeth tends to revel in past culture and times where mythology taught humans about the world around them. Creation myths taught people why the earth is here and how they came to be and with her work, she tries to infer her own symbolism and combine others, to add to the overall meaning. Spirituality is something that is also very important and prevalent with the natural world, which also adds different meanings and messages to her work.

Elizabeth wants her viewers to walk away more curious about the spirit realm. There is a hint of mystery and often life lessons to be learned within nature and society and in the modern world, which she feels is either forgotten or never learned. Whether one believes in the power of meeting spirit animals or if spirituality can be found in nature, she wants the viewer to be inspired to look at the world around them and find a bit of poetry and meaning that was perhaps not there at first glance.

The pieces Elizabeth is showing at the World’s Smallest Art Gallery is just a small sample of her work.  These works and many more are currently for sale.  To find out more visit Elizabeth at lizrichards.deviantart.com or contact her directly at lizashleyrichards@gmail.com.