A Living Legend
Abstraction can push a familiar scene to the limit of recognizability. Liz Gribin takes similar liberties with the human figure and it’s surroundings in her canvas, ‘Noblesse Oblige,’ which took one of the (Heckscher Museum) show’s top prizes.
The figures are emotionally loaded. It's not, however, facial expressions that carry the emotion but their postures and placement in space.
"What I responded to in Liz's work," Leitzes says, "is the juxtaposition between sadness and beauty. There's a real emotion beneath the surface."
[Liz] now aims to convey emotion rather than realism. Her abstract figures often have featureless faces, and she avoids rendering too many details, preferring to let poses and gestures lend her work its emotive quality, which she doesn’t attempt to define.