Liz Coats is an abstract painter who has exhibited in solo and group shows since the mid-1970s. She works in series' that explore enduring questions about colour perception and spatial relations.

 

Liz’s paintings are held in numerous public and private collections, including the Australian National Gallery, Art Gallery of New South Wales, National Gallery of Victoria, and the Auckland City Art Gallery.

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Liz’s studio is in Canberra at Strathnairn Arts Centre, 90 Stockdill Drive, Holt, ACT  2615

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LIZ COATS: THE PLACE WHERE I WORK

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My paintings explore a vein in the lineage of abstraction that brings organic and formal issues into relationship. I have been influenced by non-representational imagery in general, and constructive principles are an important source, while I understand these concepts through lived experience and in the immediacy of practice. 

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The work is intrinsically experimental. My paintings are neither illustrative of things that already exist, nor are they demonstrative of a particular style. While individual colour placements involve rigorous analysis, construction is aligned with perception of an embodied wholeness that precedes language. 

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Selecting individual colours becomes a sensory engagement with their characteristic substance and light refraction, in the environment where a painting is made. Colour formations may appear to change in density, highlights may re-distribute, or lines of force can appear as gaps in the surface array. This is where a connective logic for non-representational imagery like mine is essential, so that perceiving shifts in chromatic balance are supported within embedded frameworks.

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I invite viewers to a sensory and tangible way of viewing these paintings. In essence, they subvert attempts at analysis, instead, making primary the pleasures of contemplative, empathic seeing.