C63, 2022

Elizabeth Gourlay  

Acrylic on linen on board — Unframed.

Elizabeth Gourlay is an American abstract artist whose work emerges from a progressive process of layering colour, lines and forms, informed both by inner emotional states and her observation of nature and architecture. She lives and works in Chester (CT).  

Gourlay’s work is featured in various private and corporate collections including The Lewitt Collection, The Marriott Family and Yale University. She is the recipient of several grants and fellowships, including two Individual Artist State Grants from the DECD/Connecticut Office of the Arts. In 2011 she was an invited artist in residence at the studio of Sol LeWitt, Spoleto, Italy.  

Elizabeth Gourlay uses a wide range of media such as oil, flashe, acrylic, ink and graphite to create artfully simple and strong compositions.  

Gourlay thinks of her work as a meditation on colour and form, a gradual yet progressive study leading to a complex vocabulary of shapes, colour and line. "The shapes and lines create my own vocabulary of abstract forms."  

Musical composition, emotional states and our collective subconscious resonate within bars, lines and blocks of colour. The abstract forms emerge, layer and shift in precisely ordered, carefully composed rhythms. The artist contemplates the elements that make colour in reduced forms come to life: size, flatness, relation to its edges, and how the presence of other colors affect how it is perceived.

Gourlay draws inspiration from shapes found in everyday life and in her studio. The observed shapes either remain as they are or become simplified to their essential geometric elements. Subtleties in colour, area, edge or orientation are the catalyst for emotive responses. A broad range of colours are explored and then reduced an essential and sometimes interactive palette. Gourlay investigates colour properties: complementary or analogous, value, saturation and colour harmony vs. colour anomaly.

Gourlay cites past masters from Anni Albers, to Agnes Martin to Ellsworth Kelly as important influences. Her work is similarly focused on reducing artistic elements to their essential forms. The results are strong and distinctly emotive pieces that breathe and vibrate and remain open for the viewer to discover feeling and interpret meaning.