Testimonial
A view on Liz Strick’s work
Many artists settle down to produce endless variations on a successful theme. Liz Strick is not one of them. She challenges herself continually to find new means of expression.
Whatever is on her mind has a terrible pressure behind it, forcing her on towards more and more extreme solutions. Her work must convey emotion, and by so doing come to terms with dangerously powerful forces. This is the classic raison d’être of Expressionism, as urgent now as it was for Emil Nolde or Wassily Kandinsky in the first years of the 20th century.
The current paintings of Liz Strick have their origins in a particular kind of landscape inspired by her native Holland, in which a section of coastline is spread out under a huge sky of tumultous clouds. This theme underpins the recent paintings where swirling webs of colour spin around a hidden more stable core. By extension, angelic figures appear in these tumbling heavens, not the soppy angels of the 19th century, but figures of serious power, almost of menace.
Liz Strick is not interested in creating effects. She is much more ambitious in her insistence that the feelings of the work ring true, whatever the consequence. This integrity, and her open minded approach to the technical demands of painting, have enabled Liz Strick to complete an impressive body of work.
Oliver Bevan | Artist and curator London, February 1999
