Elizabeth Osborne has been actively painting for over sixty years, with a distinguished career from the 1960s to the present. She is especially noted for her luminous renderings in oil and watercolor that bridge formalist concerns of color and light with explorations of nature’s changing conditions and atmosphere. A leading figure of postwar art in Philadelphia, she has traveled widely throughout Europe, the American Southwest, Mexico, and the Atlantic Coast from Maryland to Maine, where she lives today. Though abstracted, her paintings bear the imprint of direct observation and specificity of place. The views in her compositions are often outward to the sea or landscape beyond. Sometimes a corner of a door, window, or porch is present, merging the constructed form with the natural environment; the artist's interior realm becomes one with the exterior world. At their most abstract, Osborne's works vibrate with expressive lines of intense color, suggesting nature's radiance. In other images, there is a quiet poetic stillness, a mood of contemplation and introspection, signaling a reflective understanding of art's spiritual and metaphysical possibilities.

Elizabeth Osborne received her BFA from the University of Pennsylvania and studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. She has had over ninety group exhibitions and over forty solo shows throughout the United States, including at the Delaware Art Museum, James A. Michener Art Museum, Lancaster Museum of Art, North Dakota Museum of Art, and George Washington University. From 1989-2017, she regularly showed at Marian Locks Gallery in Philadelphia. In 2022, a retrospective exhibition of her work was presented at Berry Campbell Gallery in New York. She received a MacDowell Colony Grant, a Fulbright Scholarship, and awards from the Ford Foundation, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and others. Her work is in many collections and museums, including the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Delaware Art Museum, James A. Michener Museum of Art, Minneapolis Institute of Art, The State Museum of Pennsylvania, Picker Art Gallery at Colgate University, and Woodmere Art Museum. She lives in Down East Maine.