Liz Ward: Recent Artworks at Moody Gallery, Houston
Liz Ward: Recent Artworks at Moody Gallery, Houston
Liz Ward has a memorable way of summoning personal experience and memory into images of the natural world. I remember the painting “Ghosts of the Old Mississippi: Baton Rouge to Donaldsonville” which Ward showed in the “Watershed” exhibition at Moody Gallery in 2017. A seemingly abstract form with colorful meandering ribbons depicted the path of the Lower Mississippi River, and evoked her New Orleans great-grandfather who was a steamboat captain. In that painting Ward explored both an ancient riverbed and her ancestral roots. She takes a similar approach with her newest artworks at Moody Gallery. Ward incorporates the experience of a daily walk on a Michigan shore into watercolors illustrations of the area’s indigenous foul- smelling skunk cabbage.
About her artworks, Liz Ward said: “I have spent nearly half of the summers of my adult life in the remote Keweenaw Peninsula in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, on the shores of Lake Superior. The summer of 2020 was different from most in that I arrived a month earlier than usual and experienced the late spring of the far north for the first time. It was also different because of the pandemic. The usual panoply of summer activities and events were replaced by a simple rhythm of daily walks and studio work.
I resumed a practice from the summer before of taking walks or riding my bike to a patch of skunk cabbage – Symplocarpus Foetidus – just outside of town, and bringing the large leaves back to the studio to make prints. These are unique prints – as similar and different as my daily walks – made by pressing a leaf into a watercolor wash freshly painted on a sheet of paper. Each print records a specimen leaf and a daily walk.
I don’t remember where or when Walt Whitman’s Specimen Days came to my attention, but the title felt right for this series and for this moment. Whitman published his prose memoir – a collection of “specimens” from his notebooks and journals – in 1882.”
Ward’s work is in numerous private, public and corporate collections, notably the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the Menil Collection. In 2012, Ward received a Brown Foundation Dora Maar House Fellowship, an international artist-in-residence program in Ménerbes, France. Liz Ward received an M.F.A. in painting from the University of Houston in 1990, and a B.F.A. cum laude from the University of New Mexico in 1982. She joined the faculty of Trinity University in 1999, where she is a Professor and Chair of the Department of Art and Art History, and an Environmental Studies faculty. Call or email Moody Gallery to make an appointment to see Ward’s work.
www.moodygallery.com