Elisabeth de Las Casas

Where lies the truth of my life?

My paintings are like windows. I look out, the viewer looks in. These are the colours of my time, the mythologies and the intersection of dimensional romance with pain and suffering. The questions that need to be asked. Like the Gordian knot the threads unravel and my soul is laid bare in landscape and history. It's right there on canvas and paper. People and stories. Nature, river and sky. Birds that speak and run with me, calling in wild voices. Sailing ships and the tree of life, the feminine so cruelly discarded makes her voice heard with tears and a search for justice. 

And then. It's like a mirror. They are reflections. These images bring redemption, but slowly, each mark scratched with the sharp pen of pain.

I want to say how hard it is, how hard it has been, but how full of joy and wonder too. This revelation, this uncovering, so real, so far removed from fragile ideas but rather something full of living, a vision of hope, the raft of the Medusa at the moment when rescue comes and hope is finally fulfilled.

It's painted sometimes as if by the light of the moon. Where shadows have the depth of hollows and the spectrum of vision is extended wider, like ultrasound, to show in sharp relief what lies within, the hidden creatures, the fragile ones with the beauty of quiet voices, so long forgotten they stretch their limbs and come out to breathe new life and rejoice for they are at last .... set free.

ARTIST STATEMENT

Elisabeth lives and works in the SW of England and also in the Outer Hebrides.

Both these places inform her work in different ways.

She has an extensive catalogue of Hebridean landscapes.