Artist Elizabeth Sullivan has been painting since childhood, but didn't find her chosen medium until 10 years ago. The event that sparked the start of her experimentation with watercolors was a move into a small apartment with no room for sculpture, oil painting or fabric dying.

That small experiment has expanded exponentially and her southwestern watercolor images of horses and other wildlife are now internationally known. Her paintings have been published as art prints in Sweden and distributed to the US and Europe, and have been licensed to companies who have produced area rugs, greeting cards, coasters and more. The small apartment is long gone, replaced by a studio in her house in Elgin, Texas.

Sullivan acknowledges that one of her inspirations is cave paintings and pictographs and the vibrant hues of the southwest. She uses an interesting technique to achieve the yellows, reds, oranges, browns and turquoise, which used a characteristic of watercolor, but is not an ordinary watercolor technique. Watercolors are transparent - so by layering one color on top of another in several stages, brilliant color pops off the page.

Another aspect of her paintings is paint that flows across the page. "The tendency of water is to flow," she says, "and I just add more water and let it flow. Of course the trick is to get it to flow where you want it to go, in the proper amount."

It certainly does flow from Sullivan's brush. The horses, buffalo, longhorn cattle and even armadillos and horned lizards seem to move on the page. "I used to paint a lot more realistically," Sullivan remarks, "but what I really wanted to express was the graceful and powerful motion of the animals, so as time passes my paintings become more and more ethereal in that expression."

She catches other animal motion, too. The armadillo mama with her four babies waddles along searching for someone's garden to root around in. The horned lizards circle each other, deciding their next moves.

In order to paint the essence of the animals in this manner, one must have familiarity and kinship for the subjects. Ms. Sullivan says she has always been around horses, even worked on an Arabian Horse Ranch for a while. She has studied the various subjects she paints - not just by being near them, but researching their habits and habitats. For example, she could tell you that armadillos always have four babies, and all four are the same sex. Hardly anyone need to know that, but if you do a painting of one baby armadillo with a mother, it would be strange.

Ms. Sullivan often participates in juried weekend art shows, and makes appearances at galleries that carry her work. But her favorite place is in her studio, working on a new commissioned painting, with her four cats for company.

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Article Submitted By: Penny Logan
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