Feb 2 – March 29

To purchase one of her paintings (three are now Sold), please contact Elizabeth at 831 622 9770 or elizabeth@wrightman.us

“Painting is stronger than I am”, said Pablo Picasso. “It makes me do what it likes.” Although that sounds a little dramatic for me, if not downright self- important, I regularly experience what Picasso is saying. Of course one cannot look directly at such a phrase, but might glimpse the feeling many times, out of the corner of one’s eye, and smile and nod one’s head knowingly.
~Elizabeth Wrightman

Elizabeth will show in the Welcome Hall gallery February and March. She lives in Carmel with her husband Paul, pastor of the Community Church of the Monterey Peninsula, and they are both ordained in the United Church of Christ.

She would be described as an expressionist, with acrylics, house paint, pastels, often collage and often drawing a lot. She majored in fine arts at the College of Wooster in Wooster, Ohio, spending her senior year however at UCSB, still with a painting emphasis.Working for the Dept. of Aging in Pittsburgh, PA then attending Pittsburgh Theological Seminary as they raised teenagers, she would paint and show maybe once year. She then became a pastor, and also a hospital chaplain.

Upon moving to the Monterey Peninsula 14 years ago Elizabeth experienced a call to full time work in the studio. She paints largely from Irish literature. (This led to an independent study of James Joyce, involving several presentations, beginning with Trinity College in Dublin, on Bloomsday.) Joining Joyce scholars from worldwide settings, Elizabeth was accepted to show her paintings from Ulysses, as the literary world celebrated 100 years since its highly controversial publication.

Her work ………..similar to dreams perhaps…. alternates between the playful and the mysterious. A Celt by family origins, her family were Highlander Scots, but spent generations in Ireland. Elizabeth identifies more with the Irish imagination. At first puzzled to find poems and legends showing up center stage, as a source of subject matter, she eventually accepted it; it gave her complete peace, and a sense of homecoming. If you look up the haunting poem, the Song of Amergin, you will know everything that she knows about what she paints. The Why, When, Where and Who can be explored in more depth, with a cup and coffee at a ‘walk and talk’ in the Welcome Hall.