Our Lady

Elizabeth Shupe is a painter and mixed media artist from Portland, Oregon. Her work features a wide variety of materials, most often including glass and plastic; iridescent, holographic or metallic surfaces; and antique and vintage ephemera. She combines these materials with carefully painted figurative elements and suspends them in innumerable layers of epoxy resin.

Elizabeth initially turned to the medium of epoxy resin to overcome the limitations imposed by her life-long vision problems, which make perceiving three dimensional perspective difficult. Instead of relying solely upon rendered perspective to create a sense of depth, Elizabeth builds actual physical depth into her work, often allowing three dimensional elements to break through the normally flat surface of the painting and letting elements of her composition escape the confines of the picture plane.

Her art is very heavy with symbolism and personal meaning, often dealing with themes of life and death, creation and destruction, and the natural world; all seen through a strong and decidedly feminine perspective. She has created a unique style all her own that emphasizes pattern and ornamentation and blurs the lines between painting and assemblage. Elizabeth believes that painting is an extension of magical practice, and she sees the practice of art making as an invocation of the divine.