ARTIST'S STATEMENT

When I paint I often experience something that Deepak Chopra calls timeless awareness and I feel connected in the present moment to the grace of humanity.

Although I long to paint in a non-linear large abstract format, the paintings that emerge are of animals and people, very often with a narrative. John Berger writes in his book 'About Looking' that animals first entered the imagination as messengers and promises. They were subjected and
worshipped, bred and sacrificed. With parallel lives, animals offer man a companionship which is different from any offered by human exchange. Different because it is a companionship offered to the loneliness of man as a species.

In the myths, the beast of prey and the animal who is preyed upon represent two aspects of life — the aggressive, killing, conquering, creating aspects of life and the one that is the subject matter, as well as the animal as friend, confidant and messenger from God. The animal that is preyed upon
becomes a reflection of who we are as a species. Maybe the search for and belief in the Divine is what drives me to paint portraits of living creatures.

“What distinguished man from animals was the human capacity for symbolic thought...the life of a wild animal becomes an ideal, an ideal internalized as a feeling surrounding a repressed desire. The image of a wild animal becomes a starting point of a daydream.” — John Berger

BIOGRAPHY

Elizabeth Lennie is an actress who lives in mid-town Toronto with husband actor/author Mike Kirby and their three daughters. Together Mike and "Libby" run Voiceworx.