For artist Erika Sprister Lizée, pure feelings can be expressed as glowing orbs, shiny vines and radiant buds. In her oil paintings, Lizée conveys a powerful imagination at work and draws instant comparisons to the clean, soft images of Georgia O’Keefe.

Just as O’Keefe sought to draw attention to nature with large flowers as the single focus of some of her paintings, Lizée leads the viewer on a journey into the inner workings of the human mind with simple, yet dazzling organic forms that you might imagine to be found tucked deep inside our neurons.

Erika Sprister Lizée’s oil painting exhibit, “Present in the Mind” will be displayed in the Spring Street Café gallery in downtown Sylva from June 26 through July 29. An opening reception featuring live music will be held Thursday, June 28, from 6-8 p.m. at the café.

The exhibit represents about six months of Lizée’s most recent work.

“I kind of work in spurts,” she said during a lunchbreak from her waitressing job at the Spring Street Café.

Lizée makes time for her painting whenever she can and paints at home. She begins with sketches and then uses thin layers of paint on the canvas to gradually bring out the forms that come to mind.

“Often my subconscious mind reveals itself when I find myself painting and not understanding what the piece is until after it’s finished,” she explained. It’s a process she calls “painting it out.”

While some people talk out their problems and others write in journals, Lizée chooses to do the same thing through painting.

“I feel most at home using oil,” she said.

After earning her bachelor of fine arts degree at UNC-Asheville in 1998, she has continued to develop her skills on her own.

“I think I’ve gotten a lot more refined in my technique,” she said. “Things have gotten crisper.”

The forms that appear in her paintings look like bundles of electric energy, alien flowers and vines, magnified cellular organisms, strange worlds you want to enter and explore.

Lizée gives titles like “A Channel Opens” and “Open Up and Shine” to convey that sense of freedom she has with painting. The curvy vines invite the viewer into a warm glow of light that seems to say, “C’mere.”

The orbs in her work symbolize her state of mind, so when you see fiery red balls that seem to multiply within a shell-like mirror in “Sometimes I can make it stop,” you get a sense of the intense pain she feels when her migrane headaches strike. Other pieces like “Two Sides of the Same Coin” reveal the dichotomy of the chaotic and calm states of her mind. In “Finding the Golden Egg,” the ball has a soft glow and appears a bit elongated. It’s in a state of relaxation and open to feel what is around it.

While most of Lizée’s pieces in the Spring Street Café are oil paintings on canvas, some are oil paintings on top of collages done on wood blocks. There’s an interesting push/pull feeling in these works that intrigues Lizée. The viewer can look at the piece from a distance and then find more details with a close-up inspection. The layers of her painting represent the multiple layers of our own psyche.

Having the exhibit in the café allows a person to come in, enjoy a good meal and view the paintings in a relaxed environment. And even if you don’t have an art history degree, you can at least begin to appreciate what fantastical forms are present in the mind.

Spring Street Café is located just below City Lights Bookstore on Spring Street in downtown Sylva. For more information on the exhibit, call 828.586.1800.

 

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The Smoky Mountain News