Liza Myers
Navajo
I paint with acrylic, watercolor and oil. In three-dimensional work I use clay, mixed media and occasionally fiberglass.
The entangled intricacy of the natural world fascinates me. A strong thread of global inter-connectedness weaves its way through my imagery. This has been a theme in my work since childhood, probably because I spent many formative years living in the jungles and coasts of Central and South America and in the high dry desert of northern New Mexico. These places are united in my heart and mind through personal experience. We are connected through nature. Botany and biology vary in each ecosystem, but the pulse of life unites us. Every form of living creature has a unique and fascinating quality.
For the last several years I have focused my paintings on the tangled architecture of nests and the textural variety of the materials from which nests are woven. The image of a nest stretches beyond all linguistic and cultural barriers, conveying a rich variety of messages: hope for the future; the wonder of natural things; the tenacity of the small, winged creatures who build them. These very same creatures glide over oceans, and continents stitching the latitudes together with an invisible web of flight patterns.
Things you might not know about Liza but were afraid to ask!
Liza was born in Maryland where as a small child she used to make sculptures from native red clay and watch them melt in the rain. She used the same mud again to make something new. She’s still making sculptures from mud, but now she fires them in a kiln. You can have one in your garden!
When she was 11 her family moved to Mexico, the beginning of a zigzagging migration north and south between the continents, much like the birds whose nests she studies and paints. They lived on the jungle coast on Nicaragua, in the Andean highlands of Colombia, on the llanos of Uruguay and in the steamy, shady, orchid-filled forests of Paraguay.
Liza went to George School, a Quaker boarding school in Pennsylvania because there was no secondary education for girls in the town her family lived in Bluefields, Nicaragua.
She has been exhibiting her work professionally for 20+ years on two continents and across the US.
And she has ALWAYS painted. ALWAYS.