About the Artist

Liz Young is a botanical artist who lives in Los Angeles, California. Her ink on paper original drawings study flora, fruit, arrangements and classically inspired vessels. Liz received her B.A. in 1998 from Brown University where she also took Studio Art classes. Liz studied English Literature and Architecture at Queen Mary University of London, England. In Florence, Italy, she studied Italian Renaissance Art History at Syracuse University.

Her ink on paper botanical drawings have been called “The Nudes of Flowers” for their pale, silhouetted quality. In her works, Liz explores “harmony, balance,” and celebrates “the bending fluidity and musing movement of florals.” Liz believes “each flower possesses a kind of timeless femininity, intrigue and ephemeral style all its own.” The seemingly endless variation of form and beauty in the natural world is her evergreen curiosity and joy. 

As a child, Liz’s mother, a painter and a gardener, instilled in her a deep love for the natural world and taught her how to draw and see negative space, the invisible shapes between forms, which influenced her style. For her process, Liz explains, “Each drawing is an intuitive expression, a rather dream-like process of balancing, and shaping, and creating to hopefully conjure a state of beauty along the way.” 

For irony and playfulness, Liz likes to add a dash of imaginary flair to her work “with the occasional confetti-like sprinkling of whimsy here and there. I like to remind myself, it doesn’t matter if the line really exists. For me, it’s not about seeking realism or perfection. It’s more about drawing freely in my natural style, and balancing the polarities of a composition. I enjoy striking a pleasing intermix between loose and tight, focused and unfocused, high and low, while blending textures of the real with the imagined.” The softer, more primitivistic imperfections in art have always resonated with Liz as something more honest, more free, more human-- "reflective of the imperfectly-beautiful humanity behind all art."

Philosophically, Liz draws on her studies of Eastern Religions. “I see duality as ever-present. I am intrigued by the interplay of light and dark that defines art-- and human experience." Optimism permeates her work and she prefers to see her drawings as outlined white spaces, rather than just black lines. When asked how she knows when a drawing is complete, Liz casually says, "Well, my eyes don’t rest on the page until I see… pretty.”

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