Elizabeth Murray is well known for photographing Monet’s gardens in Giverny, France for nearly 40 years. In 1985 Elizabeth contributed to the restoration of these extraordinary gardens. Trained as a painter, and gardener she brought her eye for composition, color, and effects of light to her photography as well as her paintings and garden design.
Elizabeth’s photography is in the collection of the M.H. deYoung Museum of San Francisco and the New Orleans Museum of Art, as well as in public hospitals and private collections. She has enjoyed many one-woman shows featuring her hand-painted photographs in museums and galleries across the United States and Japan. She has received numerous awards of distinction.
Elizabeth Murray is the author, photographer, and illustrator of several books on gardening and creativity, including the best-selling Monet’s Passion: Ideas, Inspiration, and Insights from the Painter’s Gardens (over 300,000 hard back books) Living Life in Full Bloom 120 Daily Practices to Deepen Your Passion, Creativity & Relationships, Cultivating Sacred Space, Gardening for the Soul (sold 85,000 copies), Painterly Photography; Awakening the Artist Within and other garden books. Her photography has been published in thousands of calendars, magazines, and books.
abeth was the innovative leader of the “Painterly Photography” movement using a vintage Polaroid camera and rare SX-70 film. This film allows her to hand draw on the photograph and thus move the layers of colored emulsion like paint. Murray enlarges these prints archivally onto watercolor paper. Each photograph is then painted with oils, colored pencils, and pastels. These romantic hybrid images combine her love of both photography and painting.
Ms. Murray’s photographs and paintings are collected privately as well as in hospitals and corporations. They are known for their beauty and tranquility. Her garden designs have transformed public spaces into sanctuaries that offer healing, reflection, and beauty for all those in search of relaxation, solitude, and renewal.
As an Artist and professional gardener, I was delighted to live in Giverny, France in 1985 and assist in the restoration of Monet’s gardens. I have returned annually to photograph, paint, and teach. Steeped in Monet’s living legacy, his gardens, and the light has profoundly informed my eye and aesthetic. I am passionate about beauty, observing nature, and creating, gardens, paintings, photography, and writing.
With photography, I have captured exquisite moments of mist, dew, bloom. These photographs have traveled with Monet’s paintings to museums across the US to interpret and expand Monet as a garden artist and what he was painting in his later years when his paintings became more abstract. My photographs have been published widely in books, hundreds of calendars, etc. For 25 years I blended my painting and photography using SX-70 polaroid images I would alter the surface with the emulsion was still malleable then enlarge on watercolor paper and paint on the surface. This work traveled in Japan for three years and was represented in Photography West gallery in Carmel for 18 years. I enjoyed many one-woman sold-out shows.
My first love is painting. Watercolor to capture fleeting moments outdoors, transparent, and quick. I improved my speed and immediate response to light, color, and place by painting for weeks going down the Grand Canyon between rapids. I love seeing the vibration of colors in a different light. Some of these quick sketches become large oil paintings in my studio. They bring a bouquet of immediacy and freshness.
My intimate watercolors are so lively they seed and inspire my large oils. Like a musician or dancer who must constantly practice their art to be fluid- I paint in watercolors daily- filling notebooks and folded panoramic sheets of paper with colors, forms, and light I find in forests, by the sea, and in gardens.
My oil paintings have expanded in size over the past two decades. My work creates windows and environments. I am not satisfied to make a small decorative statement – which often requires such containment and structure. Like a garden I want to envelope the viewer into an environment that transports and deepens their visual and often spiritual experience. I have been painting forests as I believe trees are sentient beings dancing together connected to the earth and the unseen world as well as being the great alchemists of nature – turning light into sugars and life itself. Their trunks are of all textures and forms twisted, straight, smooth and peeling. There is so much I learn from trees as a community that share resources for mutual thriving.
I am drawn to the pure joy of color and textures playing with the light of abstract forms. More like weaving a tapestry with my paint. My abstract paintings all come from my intimacy with the natural world. My hours and weeks spent outdoors observing. Each year I go into the wilderness to paint, often fasting and camping as a spiritual discipline of simplicity of deep presence. Weather in the jungles of the Amazon, rain forests of the Pacific Northwest or the redwood forests on the California coast where I live, I have a deep connection to trees. My painting is my music, my dance -the offering I extend like a bouquet for beauty, healing, and joy.
