Elizabeth Beck's Art

pear pair
Originally uploaded by eeeee

I have loved art for as long as I can remember. I enjoy drawing and coloring, painting and pottery, crafts and collage, assemblage and sewing, beading and building. I studied art history in college. I have a Master’s Degree in education. I did some Post-Bac work in drawing and painting. I have spent most of my adult life being an elementary school teacher or a mom. It was when my youngest child started kindergarten that I finally and completely threw myself entirely into my art.

My paintings generally reflect the happy outlook that I have on life. I don’t think I could create an angst ridden, moody piece. I tend towards bright colors. Green, orange and dark pink are my favorites, though, I’m also very partial to red, blue and yellow. My apologies go out to the under appreciated purple.

There are a number of themes that I have been exploring recently in my work: flowers, hearts, Mona Lisa.
I also have recurring artistic elements: the dictionary, print, letters, numbers, symbols, bingo cards, game pieces, maps, as well as odd bits of hardware and ephemera: the odder, the better!

In our every day life, we are surrounded by such vast quantities of print that we frequently don’t notice it…or, we know what it says without even looking. Being bombarded with print is a fact of life. I, personally, LOVE print. I like the fonts and the letters and the words and the stories. I find every bit of the process from individual letters to completed novels to billboards to hang tags on your new pants to be enticing, interesting, worth noticing. To capitalize on this “love of letters,” I like to use text as texture in my work. I use printed pages like dictionary pages and snips of books. I also like to add large bold print that is just regimented letters and symbols, not words. To add this textural text, I use both stencils and stamps.

I have a few oddball bits that I frequently add to my art. Vintage Bingo cards are a favorite. I don’t recall ever having a huge fondness for playing Bingo, but I think the look of a Bingo card is the epitome of printing beauty. Blocks and squares and letters and numbers line up pristinely on a card….and sometime they are in color! The joy! I think in my work the Bingo cards are icons to the joy of letters and numbers and tidy rows. Bingo cards might even be shorthand for all the letters and numbers and symbols and words that we see, but don’t notice in our day to day lives.

The few posts in this blog are my effort to have a more professional format to explain and show my art. Please feel free to contact me with any questions about art availability and commissioned pieces.

Art is a great joy to me. Thank you for letting me share that joy with you.

Funky Flowers

bingo bouquet
Originally uploaded by eeeee

The idea behind my flowers is to make something beautiful out of the oddball. The flower arrangement is such a standard fixture in traditional art, but it is so easy to make non-traditional: by putting the flowers in a Bingo card vase, or making them out of dictionary pages, or figuring out some other quirky element. They still look like flowers, but they have a whimsy to them. They have something about them that is quintessential flower, while simultaneously having something about them that is absolutely not flower. I think of my flowers as all being recycled. I think I can make anything into a flower. I can take any ordinary bit of this or that and give it a poof of the extraordinary…and then call it a flower.

If you would like to see more photos of my flower art, please click on this link to my Flower set on Flickr.

Heart Art

6 more hearts
Originally uploaded by eeeee

When I originally painted these particular heart collages, I had an Andy Warhol thing in mind. He used bright colors and simplified images. Whether he was doing soup cans, Chairman Mao, or Marilyn Monroe, he made multiple, multiple, multiple copies to display in large grids. These hearts are meant to be displayed in groups. Anything less than four probably isn’t really enough! After making and selling loads of these, I continued to explore the iconography of the heart. My favorite bits of ephemera to use include maps (who doesn't need a map into someone else's heart?), tickets (admit one...to your heart.....we need lots of tickets like that), and playing cards (anyone for the queen of hearts?), as well as my usual bits like text, dictionary pages, and bingo cards.


If you would like to see more heart art, please visit my Heart Art Set on Flickr.

My Mona Lisas

constellation mona major
Originally uploaded by eeeee

Mona Lisa is probably my favorite artistic element to put into collages. I love her. When Leonardo Da Vinci painted her in the sixteenth century, surely he had NO idea how long lasting and famous her image would become. Now, she is so famous that she is hardly even considered for her beauty, the enigma of her smile, the skill of the painting. Now, she is on tshirts, spaghetti sauce jars, and, yes, other artists’ art. I chose Mona to re-enchant
her, to give her a story. I love giving her comfortable shoes, fairy wings, a stylish haircut and great accessories. I like making her whimsical and fun. She still smiles at us with her mysterious look, but in my art she is flying through the sky, walking pigs, or wearing her newest Lands’ End shoes. Mona was extraordinary, then she became so prevalent she was ordinary, and now I hope I am making her extraordinary once again. How could a Bingo Mona ever be considered ordinary?


Feel free to visit more of my Mona Lisa art at my Flickr site. This link will take you directly to the Mona Lisa set.