Liza Olinde is an American artist whose work expresses her lifelong attraction to and inspiration from the wild, untamed elements of our natural world. Our increasingly complex relationship with nature, as well as our perception of it as simultaneously art, provider and habitat are her points of departure, drawing inspiration from horizon-sized landscapes to the intricate designs of the smallest flora and fauna found within them.

Olinde’s newest collection continues to explore vibrant and lyrical color relationships to elicit ever-stronger emotional responses from both herself and her viewers alike. The inherent transparency of her preferred cold wax medium facilitates extensive color-layering processes that result in ethereal and tactile qualities which recall cloud-filtered sunlight or land-forms seen from bird flight.

Her work is informed in part by the environmental diversity of her biography: born in 1954 in pastoral Jarreau, Louisiana beside sugarcane fields and serene bayou tributaries of the Mississippi River, Olinde earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. Since departing the Southeastern United States, she has worked at Yellowstone and Sequoia National Parks, has called New York City and Tokyo home, and is currently based in New York’s Hudson Valley. She has worked in a variety of disciplines, including metal sculpture, dyed silk, oils, acrylics, quilting, land art and loom woven textiles.

Olinde’s work celebrates freedom from literal symbolism and allegory, embracing figurative ambiguity, but she prefers not to label herself as an abstract artist, encouraging viewers instead to form personal and concrete interpretations of, and associations between what they see and the natural world which sustains them. She draws our focus away from inorganic and indifferent times, centers it within the luminosity of her canvases, and releases us outside with replenished awareness of nature, its splendor, and its significance.