My work is made in response to the energy around me, which shifts dramatically between seasons here on the East End of Long Island. From airy, monochromatic studies I tend to make in the quiet winter months to the frenetic and heavily-layered explosions of color and form that dominate my larger paintings, each piece is flooded with things happening around me. The music and podcasts I listen to in the studio, news from my car radio as I carpool my children around, the local politics my husband delivers to the dinner table - these things and my personal reactions to them are woven in to my work through strokes of charcoal and swaths of paint.
My love affair with markmaking has multiple facets, but I most correlate it to the inadequacies of spoken or written language. As a stutterer, words often fail me, but making marks on paper provides an immediate and direct release of energy that expands beyond the limits of my vocabulary. I am motivated by the idea that a person’s energy can be bound into a mark, and the fact that this mark has never been made before (or can never be reused) gives it an honesty and authenticity that established words lack.
Elizabeth Karsch (b. 1980, New York, NY) is a visual artist, writer, mother and teacher based in Sag Harbor, NY. She received a Bachelor of Science in Studio Art, with a minor in Art History, from Skidmore College (2002) and studied at Studio Art Centers International in Florence, Italy. Karsch was a member of the Bonac Tonic Art Collective, which revitalized the East End’s contemporary art scene in the early-2000s, and her work has been exhibited at Queens Museum, Parrish Art Musem, Guild Hall, and independent galleries in the Hamptons, Los Angeles, Florida and New York City.