Studio Feed

This piece arrived the way everything seems to now — one step at a time, with no full vision in sight. Black gesso, then acrylic and gold leaf, then silk, then oil paint on top of the silk. Each layer came through days or weeks apart. Then last week I pressed some leaves from a tree on the property, laid them on the painting, and they landed as if the entire piece had been designed around them.

It's the same thing Rilke wrote about — everything is gestation. Unhurried, unforced, trusted. I used to feel urgency around finishing. Now I'm learning what it means to let something fully arrive. Jump over to Studio Investigations to see this piece in context with everything else that's been forming.

Here is the quote from Rilke: 

_{"Everything is gestation and then bringing forth. To let each impression and each germ of feeling come to completion wholly in itself, in the dark, in the inexpressible, the unconscious, beyond the reach of one's own intelligence, and await with deep humility and patience the birth-hour of a new clarity: that alone is living the artist's life, in understanding and in creating. There is no measuring in time, no year matters, and ten years are nothing. Being an artist means, not reckoning and counting, but ripening like the tree which does not force its sap and stands confident in the storms of spring without fear that after them may come no summer.”}
― Rainer M. Rilke

The studio is moving for the summer — seeking ease, air conditioning, more flexibility. And somewhere in the middle of packing up, I grabbed a piece of Yupo paper and pulled the leftover paint off my palette onto it. No reference, no stakes, no plan. Just what came through.

I love the idea of doing this every time I clean the palette. Little studies, intuitively led — base layers for future pieces, or just exercises in freedom. A poet I love wrote that everything is gestation, that ideas need time to come to fruition without the intellectual mind getting involved. That's what I'm leaning into. Feeling my way in the dark, and trusting what's growing there.

I woke up anxious and just started — pulling silk over panel edges, feeling the material bunch under my fingers. Five minutes in, the next idea for the piece arrived. Not from thinking. From touching.

That's what material-first means for me now. Feeling and sensing before concept. It's the opposite of how I worked for years, and it's taking me somewhere I can't map in advance. Under the Canopy was the first painting I had to make this way, start to finish. Now it's spreading into everything.

Most of what's on the table right now centers on a single discovery: layering silk over gold leaf, then painting on top.

Multiple pieces in process — each testing a different weave of silk. The weave determines the transparency, which changes everything. Finer weaves let the leaf breathe through more directly. Heavier ones diffuse it into something softer, more atmospheric.

What's emerging is a kind of optical depth. The silk doesn't obscure the leaf — it creates another layer for the light to travel through. Luminosity with atmosphere. An immediate sense of something interior, something receding.

I finished a small piece today and teared up making it — a painting of no specific place that feels like a place I've been. Somewhere in the making, the title arrived: I Grew Up Here. That led to something bigger. I've been noticing this shift — in Under the Canopy, in Cottonwood — where the work pulls from feeling states rather than places. Memories I can't locate but can feel. A new category was born: Memory Fields. This piece is silk over gold leaf over wood, a recent discovery — haunting luminosity, a color you can't quite place. It belongs to something just beginning.

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This piece started with seeds — literal seeds laid down first, then covered in leaf. The texture they create underneath is tiny, irregular, almost imperceptible, but it catches light in a way that creates interference in the visual field. Abundance was the intention from the start. The image took longer to arrive.

A few weeks in, I'm starting to see vague flower shapes coming through. I want to keep it atmospheric — the kind of thing that reveals itself slowly, that asks you to stay with it. I think that's where my work is going: pieces that require more presence. Not just from me, but from you.

Under the Canopy — 60×60, oil on wood — came from a real memory of looking up through cottonwood trees at Jewel of the Creek Preserve, and from every moment I've ever stood beneath a canopy and felt my whole body settle. A sunset sky appeared on the right that I didn't plan. A forest opened deeper on the left than I imagined. The central tree became something that feels like home. This is a world to enter and keep looking into.

It came through at 2am — cover a panel in gold leaf, then draw on top with soft pastel. I didn't even know if it was possible. But weeks ago I'd picked up a bottle of pumice ground at the art store, no real plan, just a pull. Turns out it creates exactly the tooth pastel needs to adhere. I hadn't known that when I bought it.

These are small studies, pure play. But the pastel layered over gold does something I wasn't expecting — a luminosity, a depth. And now I can't stop imagining where it goes. Landscapes with pastel drawn on top. We'll see.

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I had a small window this morning and went into the studio just to lay down a layer of black gesso on a dress panel. Then I spotted a scrap of embroidered white fabric I'd been holding onto — felt the pull — and in an instant the whole direction shifted. The fabric went down into the wet gesso, picked up texture, started becoming something. I pulled a little gesso back over it. Now it's its own decorative element and I have no idea where it goes next. A million possibilities just opened up.

That looseness only comes from a certain state. Right before this I was working through something emotionally — and when I came to calm, the creativity followed. That's not incidental to my practice. That is my practice.

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The past couple of months have been a whirlwind — the open house, the end of a season, and underneath all of it, a quietly expanding sense of who I am as an artist. I'm rewriting my artist statement because the old one no longer holds everything. Metal leaf landscapes, abalone shell, abstract pieces, heavily textured oil work with seeds, Cottonwood nearly ready to close — it's all alive at once.

What I'm landing on is this: I make worlds for you to enter. Different materials, different bodies of work, but the same through line that's always been there — a deep connection to nature. There was a brief identity crisis in the middle of it, I won't pretend otherwise. But on the other side of that is something I've wanted for years: walking into the studio and making whatever I feel moved to make. That's where I am now.

If you scroll back to studio drop 29, you'll see where this piece began - with an acrylic underpainting that completely surprised me. I was just in total flow, and it felt like something I'd never experienced before with paint and inner vision.

You know that feeling when you've been trying to speak another language for ages, translating every single word in your head, and then suddenly it just clicks? You're actually thinking in that language, flowing with it naturally. That's exactly what this painting felt like.

I hadn't touched pure painting flowers in so long, I genuinely didn't know what would happen. But working on this piece, these expressive colors just poured out of me.

This is my take on Anne's Roses - a composition I've been exploring for years - but with this expressionistic style I didn't even know was living inside me.

After that initial acrylic layer, seen in SD29, I went in with oils, and now she's complete.

For me, this piece carries my continued artistic evolution. It's the expansion of my visual language - the same through line, but me evolved at another level.

This piece is available now. Contact studio@elizabethpage.art for details.

A continuation of my tree series, this piece came from the continued search for that moment when light hits your eyes between the branches. Everything pauses for a second, and you can see nothing and everything all at once—suspended in light.

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This piece is available as of 3/26/26— contact studio@elizabethpage.art for details.

Salt River Horses is part of Re-Enter Nature, and it came together the way this work tends to — through following something I didn't fully understand. A mark that felt wrong, wiped away, and suddenly the whole atmosphere shifted. Forms kept appearing and dissolving — animals, landscapes, shapes that wouldn't settle. I stopped trying to define them. That's where the piece lives: not in what you're looking at, but in how you're seeing.

I'm mid-session on Cottonwood and fully on the edge. No reference, no clear vision for how it resolves — just the next mark, and then the next. I'm learning that sometimes I have to get more lost in a piece before the clarity comes through. More chaos, more color, more paint — until something to work with emerges. My logical brain has no idea how this is going to resolve. I'm learning to be okay with that.

There's the obvious way collectors matter — and then there's the deeper way: I often understand my own work through the experience of it being received. A conversation with one of you recently made that undeniable.

Asking about When Trees Breathe led us back to the 60×60 Cottonwood I'd abandoned — and in tracing that thread I realized the two were connected to something personal that needed to resolve first. Somewhere in that conversation, it did. This morning I walked into the studio and saw Cottonwood clearly for the first time. Thick, chunky white paint for the light. The opposite of leaf — opaque, built up, physically present.

I'm ready to go back in. You helped me get there.

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That Mountain Chain is just finished, re-entered and reinvented as part of the Re-Enter Nature series. What I love most is the ambiguity — people see whatever landscape lives closest in their memory. As I worked, it started looking like creosote, then prickly pear, and I made a choice to stop defining it. That's new for me. I used to want you to know exactly what you were seeing. Now I'm interested in the space where you can't be sure — because that's where the real connection to nature lives. We're always trying to classify, separate, distinguish. This work asks you to just be in it.

Soft Turns on Hard Edges has been waiting — I knew it wasn't finished. Today I went back in, reworking the bottom half, and somewhere in that process accidentally created the atmospheric mountain skyline I've been trying to figure out for a commission. The layered evening light, the hazy distance — it's been escaping me in gold and silver leaf for months. I wasn't even trying for it today. That's exactly when it arrived.

Three things were different today — the wrong brush, a dark background instead of light, and acrylic instead of oil. Each one forced me out of my usual way of working. All three together cracked something open. Marks I've never made before started coming through, and I don't quite know what they are yet. I'm setting these aside for a week to let the newness settle — but I think something just shifted.

Anne's roses have followed me since the beginning. I came in with a plan — and then forgot my brushes. One brush, acrylic instead of oil, and suddenly everything opened up. Now I have this underpainting I love and no idea what comes next. Which feels exactly right.

When Trees Breathe began with a hike, a specific composition, light splitting through branches. But somewhere in the making I stopped returning to the reference and just went deeper into the piece — remembering. Reds and pinks came in that were never in the photo. All the times I've ever seen light move through trees arrived at once, because it's always the same light.

I also noticed I was stepping back less. Just trusting the hand. And when I did step back, it was right. That trust is something I've been chasing my whole life as a painter — what it means to work from inner eye rather than outer reference. It's becoming clear that everything I've ever seen and felt is already in me, available whenever I need it.

This piece is also opening a door back to the large 60×60 Cottonwood I set down a while ago. The threads are pulling together. I'm not there yet — but I can feel it coming.

I photographed When Trees Breathe twice and called it finished both times — knowing something was missing but having nothing left to do. Then a sheet of abalone shell arrived, from the heart of the shell, with tight patterning and a blush of pink. I opened the package and knew: the trees weren't done yet. One broken fragment landed perfectly along a line in the tree, as if I'd planned it from the start. I hadn't. It was just waiting.

This is what I'm learning — calling something finished, even when it isn't, and trusting the discovery to arrive on its own.

This piece began as Boulder Play — a study I shared in Studio Drop 20, created without reference. What carried forward was the atmosphere. I was chasing that powdery lift in the sky — clouds that feel suspended rather than placed.

Most of the work unfolded in subtle shifts of air and tone. I thought it was finished. I photographed it. And in the act of seeing it through the lens, I saw what was missing.

Paper.

Within thirty minutes, I layered it in. The surface shifted immediately— dimension, texture, a new kind of depth. The landscape moved from suggestion to presence.

More of these dream landscapes to come.

Cloud Edges surprised me. While reviewing Horizon in Seasonal Salons, I remembered how hard I tried to create sharp, abstracted cloud forms — pushing against my natural vocabulary of soft transitions and atmosphere. The more I aimed for hard edges, the more the piece resisted. It stalled under expectation. Horizon took three months. This piece came through in two days. Only in the final moments did I realize: these were the edges I had been reaching for all along. They emerged not through striving, but through allowing the material and form to lead.  It’s one of my favorite kinds of discoveries — when something long desired arrives naturally, without force.  Sometimes what we chase appears only after we stop directing it.

*note from Elizabeth after the fact* I looked at it a few days later and, it's not done! I'm not sure what it needs, so it is retired for a while until the next step comes to me.

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There's a piece I've loved for years — a mountain chain, big boulders, a valley opening in the distance. It's been in shows. People have loved it. It lived on my wall. And somehow, standing in front of my studio closet, I saw it differently. That's the one.

This is part of ReEnter Nature, a growing body of work born from pieces I thought were finished — framed, photographed, done — until something in me said not yet. I go back in. Paper, material, mother of pearl. The work gets bigger than me, which is the point.

This particular piece has a history of its own. An early one, from when I was still learning how the materials moved over time. The blue leaf faded — I didn't know it would — and I got to watch it change. Which feels right, actually. It's always been a living thing.

Now it's coming home with me again. I don't know the direction yet. Maybe the boulders. Maybe the bushes. The action will tell me — it always does.

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I walked into this session with a clear idea — a red abstract palette inspired by another piece. That decision was made before I touched the surface.

Once the molding paste met the vessel, everything changed.

The first upward stroke established vertical movement and scale. The composition revealed tall mountains with minimal sky, and the original color plan dissolved.

The risk in that moment was abandoning the initial vision. But the material was already leading.

Direction often emerges through action — not before it.

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Another collaborative vessel begins. Watch as the base layer establishes vertical motion. The feeling of the tools, the palette knife, the paste, the paint, scraping over fired clay informed every next decision.

This 18 x 36 vertical piece surprised me this morning. I walked into the gallery and it was upside down — and it looked fantastic. I could suddenly see it complete: forms in the foreground, the middle ground, disappearing into the distance. And I felt it asking me not to reach for a reference.

This is new territory for me with landscape. I've always worked from photos, the same way I used to with florals before "Rest on My Shoulders" broke that open. I wasn't planning to work this way, but here it is, asking me to trust the emotional memory already living inside me.

The vulnerable part is holding it loosely as it grows bigger — not letting that logical brain make it precious. Just letting it reveal itself, trusting what wants to come through.

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I just finished Past the Saguaros (18 x 24, mixed media). I kept thinking about how saguaros feel like they’re talking to each other — like friends on a hike — and how they’re always these bold landmarks.In this piece they stand right up front and invite you to look past them into the sky, where I used this wild, patterned metal leaf that doesn’t really “match,” but with the saguaros in the picture, everything belongs.It’s newly finished and currently available — if it feels like a yes, you can always reach out to ask about it.

This piece is currently available; use the contact form or email: studio@elizabethpage.art to inquire.

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Join Me on the Mountain is an 11 x 14 mixed media painting with gold leaf, silver leaf, abalone shell, paper, and a lot of love.

I worked on and finished this piece while my dad was in the hospital, when my heart felt achy and everything was a little heavy. The mountain became a place of respite for me: head in the clouds, surrounded by blue, blue sky and the iridescence of abalone shell. The invitation, for me and for you, is to step onto that mountaintop for a moment, let the heaviness fall away, and rest in the beauty there.

The Path Unseen and Taken is a 30 x 30 mixed media painting in oil with gold, silver, and mixed metal leaf. I built everything around the sky first — layers of 16k white gold and a soft, dyed “blonde” silver leaf, with clear abalone shell so it feels natural, luminous, almost quietly lit from within.

The cactus forms grew up around that light, with small touches of mother-of-pearl scattered through the painting. There’s a path you can see in the center, and then it disappears — a way forward that doesn’t show you where it ends.

This piece came through in a moment of taking a path in my own life without knowing the outcome, choosing to take the next step anyway, and letting my focus stay on the luminous sky.

Today I share a moment before stepping into The Celebration of Fine Art, when I wasn’t feeling fully in the flow and needed to honor that honestly. I reflect on starting small, trusting the process, and how patience, emotional depth, and lived experience quietly shape the work just as much as moments of confidence.

During my hike today the cottonwoods and the light slowly put me back together after a very full stretch of life. I thought this collection’s next piece would be a sweeping desert vista, but instead the invitation was to rest, to wait, to listen.

This underpainting is rooted in that waiting. In letting the essence speak when it’s ready. In releasing the attachment I carried through Ironwood and choosing play, openness, and surprise instead.

I don’t know how Cottonwood will unfold—only that its energy is rest and renewal, and that uncertainty itself feels like the doorway.

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🎨 Your Creativity Prompt:(Choose the one that calls to you—or do both)

Option 1: Wait With Your Body

Find something in your life right now where you feel the urge to rush, decide, or push forward. Instead of doing anything about it, go outside. Walk. Notice what your body feels. Notice light. Notice shapes. Don't solve anything. Just let your nervous system reset—the way mine did under the cottonwoods. The answer will come when it's ready.

Option 2: Follow the Tingles

Close your eyes. Think of something you've been wanting to do but haven't allowed yourself to start. Where do you feel it in your body? Tingles in your toes? Warmth in your chest? A pull in your belly? Now: Do one small thing today that makes that sensation stronger. Not the "right" thing. The thing that makes your body say yes.

Sharing this new body of work these past two weekends has felt like standing in the middle of something arriving—exhausting, clarifying, and deeply joyful. Speaking about the pieces has shown me more of what they are, each one teaching me as it emerges.

The Collector Circle is growing alongside the work, its own quiet creation, shaping me as much as I shape it. I’m on the edge of my skill set in every direction, trusting the compass that brought me here.

A simple thank-you for witnessing this becoming. My heart is full.

As I near completion of Centuries of Growth, part of the Re-Enter Nature collection, I’m reminded that this whole series has been a practice in surrender. Every layer — the paper I once loved and later removed, the marks left behind, the broken pieces of Mother of Pearl — has been teaching me to follow what’s unfolding rather than what I planned.

Last night, I gave a talk about preparing the same way I paint: I know the first sentence, and then I trust the rest to come through. The studio works the same way. This piece, months in the making, has been my teacher in that discipline of presence.

Today, a broken shard of Mother of Pearl — once a frustration — fit perfectly into the mountain I’ve reworked countless times. It clicked into place like it had been waiting for me to trust enough to see it.

That’s the practice.

That’s the art.

Everything is always working together, even what breaks.

Cheers to Centuries of Growth, and to the devotion that brings every piece home.‍

What feels exciting about this isn’t just the piece itself, but the clarity that’s come with it. For a while, I was following pure instinct—playing with texture, light, and color—without fully knowing how these works fit within my larger body of work. Creating the Developing Collections gave them a home.

Now I see that I’ve been laying the groundwork for a future installation exhibit—one that invites viewers to move through layers of light and material, not just look at them.

In this painting, I removed some of the paper elements I loved experientially but that blocked the visual flow on a flat surface. What remains feels both resolved and open—like a breath of fresh air, clearing space for the next piece to emerge.

Finishing this one makes room for what’s next: Centuries of Growth, and new textural explorations still to come.

This session marks the completion of Ribbon Layers of Love — a piece that began as Stacked and evolved through a deep conversation between intuition, ego, and the creative act itself.

As I worked, I noticed an old story surfacing — the idea that I should be able to “get it right” the first time. Letting that go became part of the painting’s transformation. Once I stopped trying to control the outcome, the joy returned — the color, the rhythm, the play.

This session reflects on the difference between intuition and fear: how intuition feels clear, clean, and quiet, while ego complicates and questions.

It’s also an ode to what I once called “too muchness” — the fullness, the complexity, the wild harmony that lives inside both nature and my own work. Today, I see that bigness as my gift.‍

Ribbon Layers of Love is a celebration of that realization — that intuition, not perfection, is what brings a piece to life.

Reflecting  on Ironwood during a sunset walk—watching the light break through branches, seeing everything and nothing at once. It’s a meditation on movement, light, and loosening our grip on what we think a piece should become.This drop is about releasing rigid outcomes, allowing beauty to emerge through presence and surprise. After weeks of layering and overworking, I’ve returned to a place of trust with this piece—a reminder that ease and wonder come when we hold things lightly.

I'm lying on my back outside after a full studio day, looking up at blue sky — staying the course, because it's always worth it.

Some days everything flows. Other days I'm hitting my head against the wall. Yesterday I went back to the boulder piece and it didn't work. But today I came back a little more loose, a little more playful — and there it was. Not the Monet Sky dream I'd imagined, but its own beautiful fantastic thing.

And here's what made it all worth it: bright orange leaf with Sunago blue on top. Something I've never done before. I guarantee it'll show up again — probably an entire piece born from the question of how you communicate blending with a material that won't blend.

That's what persevering is about. The discoveries only come through doing — sometimes when I feel like dancing, but more often when I'm pulling myself out of a hole, trying this and then that. The piece doesn't always resolve, but it's in those moments the real finds happen.

We also revisited Ironwood — drop into Works in Progress to catch up on that one. So glad you're here.

We have a friend in town, so we're driving through Cave Creek when I look up and see these Monet clouds — little puffs of shredded cotton ball, which we never get here. I'm thinking about those clouds and the Sunago technique, and then we drive through the boulders and I see it: that's my painting. That's the underpainting I already painted.

I hadn't been happy with how Chasing or Waiting first came down — it was missing something. But today I found my reference out in the world, after I'd already painted it. I snapped some photos. Heading back to the studio when Zack naps to see what we can get.

This one is in it's in-between stages- trying to capture my favorite moment of light breaking through leaves, inspired by Andre Derain and his "Tree in a Landscape". When I went to photograph it after the first layer of leaf to show you all here, I held it up to the setting sun, with this Palo Verde, and it wasn't until I snapped the photo I realized how perfectly they lined up. Can you believe the magic? Also - it is very distict from the Derain painting! We cannot help but to paint ourselves (our experiences, our roots) into our work, even when drawing inspiration elsewhere.

This piece is delighting me — not just in its look, but in its feel. I reflect on why dresses, why this series, and what I think I’m trying to say through texture, pattern, and material. With touches of mother of pearl and paper, it becomes a meditation on femininity, the gaze, memory, and the quiet power of adornment. There’s always a story in the material — and this one is slowly revealing its own. I sense a larger project forming, but for now, I’m letting the materials lead the way.

This audio captures the energy of a piece coming to life in real time — untitled, full of cactus forms, and built on presence rather than planning. I share what shifted in me during this layer of leafing — the return to looseness, the freedom to pivot, and the deep trust in following creative nudges. It’s about more than the painting: it’s a reminder that the soft, quiet yeses we get — moment by moment — are always leading somewhere true. The more we follow them, the louder they become.

In this very first Studio Feed drop — recorded during a sunset walk with Zack — I welcome you into the heart of what The Collector’s Circle is meant to be. This isn’t just a membership with perks. It’s a space to nourish your creative aliveness, to live closer to beauty, and to remember the artist-heart that lives in you. These audio drops will be part reflection, part process, and part real-time rhythm. And this is just the beginning.