ELIZABETH HELLER

Attended PAFA 2004-2008, Certificate

Elizabeth Heller seeks to express a beauty, harmony, and power that she finds in the visible world, through the spiritual medium of art. For many years, she worked as a carpenter to support herself, and worked on her art at night, on weekends, and on days off. She served a four-year apprenticeship in the Carpenter’s Union, and worked in the union for nine years (1980-1989). From 1989 through 2015, except for while attending the Academy, she worked as an independent carpentry contractor, designing and building her own projects.

In 2004, she graduated from Community College of Philadelphia, majoring in fine art, and continued on to the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, graduating in 2008. Her studies there enlarged her knowledge of anatomy and formal structure, and sharpened her ability to critique her own work. She works in oil paint on canvas and panel. She sculpts from life in clay, and then casts the sculptures. She works on both portraits, and full figures, sometimes guided by a narrative or dream image. These sculptures may have added elements of metal or wood.

In her studio, Elizabeth Heller has painted complex still lives with translucent colored glass, and sculptural forms she has made, as part of the subject. She has also completed paintings of the Manayunk Canal, and other city landscapes in Philadelphia, returning many times to the site, to clarify her vision. Her paintings and sculptures are related to each other, common expressions of her search to express the energy, both joyful and tragic, and the gnarled complexity, of life. She is now working as a full-time, professional artist.

Her work has been included in numerous local, regional, and national exhibitions including at the Cerulean Arts Gallery, the Woodmere Art Museum, the Wharton Esherick Museum, the Lore Degenstein Gallery at Susquehanna University, the State Museum of Harrisburg and the Southern Alleghenies Museum of Art.

or follow her on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/nml_studio/

Website: Elizabethhellerart.com; Instagram: @elizabethhellerart