Elizabeth Sandia

 “These paintings represent a recent freedom from the confines of traditional realism, where everything is exact - hue, value, scene fidelity. I had lost touch with what prompted me to give up my architectural design practice 14 years ago: missing color in my life.

In August of 2007 I started experimenting with the never-used bright, saturated, rich pastels in my collection - the more contemporary ones that pushed me way beyond the "rules". Using this group of pastels in new color combinations is so exciting and stimulating and quite unpredictable. Each painting presents a challenge, a totally brand new way of representing light and shadow, a kind of electric eye-response that I cannot plan in advance.

At the same time I began painting on custom-prepared surfaces and underpaintings. This allows me to achieve unique color effects that are Impossible to duplicate.”

Elizabeth Sandia, originally from New York City,

has a varied professional art background: magazine

illustrator, advertising art director (NYC), college instructor (Ottawa), commercial and residential architectural designer (Canada & US). In Sept. '95 Elizabeth gave up her design practice in Key West and moved to Santa Fe to paint full time. A seamless transition from designing buildings to painting them helped make Elizabeth's leap of faith a reality. She now paints ranches, churches, cattle, sheep, and old trucks. Elizabeth's award-winning paintings are in corporate and private collections. She participates in fund-raising invitationals like The Coors National Western Show and San Isabel Land Protection Trust show. And her pieces have hung in the US Embassy in Ankara, Turkey. She is a signature member of

The Pastel Society of America (NYC).