These paintings present a confluence of real and imagined worlds in which landscape and figure are intimately connected. The land is a potent and omnipresent spiritual resource and I paint the landscape here as alive with color and energy. This landscape is populated with mysterious forms that function as figures in the landscape but are also part of the landscape sometimes forming the land or ascending into the sky. Ancient belief placed humans in detailed and specific relationship to nature and natural cycles. In “Spirits Abroad” I have presented a personal vision of this relationship.

—Elizabeth Strasser