Elizabeth Osborne: Verdant
Elizabeth Osborne has been actively painting for over sixty years, with a distinguished career from the 1960s to the present. Her luminous images in oil and watercolor bridge formal aspects of color and light with explorations of nature’s changing conditions and atmosphere. Osborne received her BFA from the University of Pennsylvania and studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. She has traveled widely throughout Europe, the American Southwest, Mexico, and the Atlantic Coast from Maryland to Down East Maine, where she lives today. Her paintings bear the imprint of direct observation and specificity of place while also embracing abstraction. The views in her compositions are often outward to the sea or landscape beyond. 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 stillness, a mood of contemplation and introspection, signaling a reflective understanding of art's spiritual and metaphysical possibilities.
Elizabeth Osborne has had over forty solo shows and over ninety group exhibitions at museums and galleries throughout the United States. 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, and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Her works are in many museum collections, including the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Delaware Art Museum, James A. Michener Museum of Art, Minneapolis Institute of Art, Woodmere Art Museum, and others.