About the Artist    Resume

Born in Zurich, Switzerland, Elizabeth Strasser moved to the U.S. when she was a young child. She received her undergraduate degree from the University of New Hampshire and her MFA in Painting from the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. She is a Professor at Curry College where she teaches design, drawing, and painting and also runs the ceramics studio. Her paintings, drawings, and ceramics are included in private and corporate collections in the United States, Switzerland, England, New Zealand, Norway, and South Africa.

In the artist's words:

"The recent paintings focus on place and my response to being in a certain location. The paintings seem to be a departure from the graphite drawings and ceramics in my solo exhibition at the Bromfield Gallery in 2002 which continued ideas from the installation I built at "Mobius Artist Group" in Boston in 1999. Leading to those shows, I had been working three-dimensionally in ceramics and installation and drawing intensely. I felt the desire to paint and to return to color. I had found some wonderful visual language using acrylic in thin but controlled washes in the paintings in my exhibitions at the former Helen Shlien Gallery on Newbury Street. This seemed like a constructive place to begin a new series.

The trapezoidal shape had appeared in paintings on canvas and was often an elemental form in my watercolors. I found resonance in the mysterious figurative forms in southwest rock art and the architectural keystones in ancient stone arches. In some of my work the trapezoid form has the rounded corners of a rear-view mirror or the irregular edges of a jutting rock formation. As those shapes came forward in the imagery, it seemed inevitable that the canvas should take that shape as I began to paint the series of "Site" paintings. I am still working with this shape. I have not finished this exploration of connections between the past and the present, the conscious and unconscious."

—Elizabeth Strasser, estrasse@post03.curry.edu