About Elizabeth
ARTIST STATEMENT
I am artist and entrepreneur. In the past two years, I have penned twelve books of poetry. Thus, marketing is very important to me. Today, I spend most of my time in the pursuit of my art. The entrepreneur part of me is important as I have launched many careers and created individual portfolios for artists that include individualized text and photography. As a former director and events coordinator for the non-profit Anyart Gallery in Providence Rhode Island, a small gallery that seated one hundred people, I was responsible for initiating and producing over three hundred events during a seven year period. It was during that period I ran an arts playgroup in my home and became involved in working with arts with children aged two to pre-school. I had a staff of eighteen and used the arts to make an environment that was healthy for the children engaged in what might be called in contemporary terms a play shop.
The events were so successful, to the point audience engagement became popular because I put on mystery artist events. I also designed fund-raisers that included liturgical dance, country and western shows, dance, and a wide variety of musical performers. My interest was in meshing the arts events with the visual artists showcased in in the gallery.
Because of my previous experience with Anyart, I later created a non-profit of my own which I supported with fund raising arts events and and grant writing projects. I also set up a writing school in Boulder that helped launched writers and produced portfolios for their media packages. My projects were showcased on Channel Five live in Arizona.
Today, I am an artist who is engaged in writing and disseminating my works at fairs and bookstores. I have another interest which affects the kind of work I produce, promote, and create. I am interested and involved in Bullyproof Projects initiated and co-produced by the late Paul Newman and Arthur Kanegis. I am interested in preventing gun violence and in promoting anti-bullying measures using the arts as a vehicle to accomplish a safe and better and more compassionate school environments. To support my interest in humanitarian projects, I have written plays and poems. Currently I am producing two videos that carry the message and am interested in producing more videos that will reach the public in due time.
I feel my strong point lies in the design of arts curriculae for use by schools and arts organizations. I am also a strong performance artist, something I did not know before I attended CIIS. My weakness lies in my lack of knowledge of computer technology. My last ten years spent in retail did not include exposure to any of the marvelous advances in computer technology.
Who am I ?
I am an artiste in the strictest sense of the word. Words are my special forte. I write poems, blogs, plays, and short stories. My strength lies in my voice. I make CD’s and videos, and for fifteen years I taught acting to students of all ages. I am a raconteur and a dramatic performance poet. Words are used as vehicles to make changes in people’s lives. I stress the fantastic, the metaphysical, and the lyrical.
In all of my art forms, I stress the everyday experience as meat and marrow for my poems and stories. Everything that happens in life can be elevated into the realm of art. It all depends how you look at life and what you want to make out of life experiences. In order to access the realm of art, I have to be willing to accept life as it is and use every experience no matter how seemingly trivial. I also enjoy producing other’s work and discovering unknown artists. I have spent a life engaged in the world of arts and have put together many cabaret style performances.
In my performance art I have sought to blend my voice with musical performance including jazz, classical, and pop. Occasionally, I will break out into song when the occasion demands. I have an interest in English and French folk songs. In using chalk drawings to illuminate my art, I often have created masks of delight and fantasy and thus, utilize a variety of blended pastel colors to invite, to ignite, and to initiate blended portals representative of various states of consciousness.
About my Work
My work is basically impressionistic and peppered with surreal overtones. To me, my work has music within it and the music is what drives the poetry. It is not totally sound poetry, but my work contains interpolated rhythms embedded within individual poems.
Because my first art was dance, it has definitely affected how I write. I imagine all the words are dancing down the page. I spent much of my youth in New York on Gansvoort Pier and at St. Marks in the Bowery. I listened to the Beat Poets of the Sixties and many of the jazz pianists. Early exposure to this music and poetry made a deep impression.
Being a magpie-type of poet is a difficult act. The lack of cohesive style means I can imitate various poetical styles, but I need to reclaim my own voice. I did not wish to subvert, submerge, or sabotage my own voice. What this stance means is that I have to work a lot harder to focus on a unified and strong poetic voice. Being discursive or unfocused is often a problem for many poets.
At present, I find the dramatic monologue the easiest form to use as it expresses the voice of the many interesting and remarkable characters I have met during the course of my life.
Why not focus on being a novelist or a short story writer? I am not completely at home in prose unless the work is a prose poem derived from the French impressionist school. To me, prose adds too many words that often detract from audience participation. I feel poetry can summon forth or evoke a spiritual sensibility and an awareness which is uplifting and thereby healing. To identify with the characters I describe, it important to have compassion. I feel compassion can be best evoked through the mediumistic vehicle of poetry.
Most recently, I have started making recordings of my work. I find that kind of dramatic presentation amplifies, expands, and lends the performance poet aspect to my work. It is exciting for me to make these sound recordings.
I am not so interested in the process of making poems. I am interested in performing them and getting them out to the public. That seems more important. Not to get embedded in process but rather to remain inspired so creative output is high.