By Mary Soliwoda

Lizbeth Mitty relaxes with a half glass of wine at her elbow,  winding down after a day of transporting paintings from her Brooklyn studio.  The attractive, casually dressed, blonde woman looks a bit tired after her hours of driving and delivering artworks to WFA. Yet, she enthusiastically answers questions regarding the direction some of her newer paintings have taken.  We discuss briefly the evolution of her style, but a more in depth conversation will have to wait.
In preparation for our interview, I spend a couple of days traversing Ms. Mitty’s city rendered in paint.  I see a city wearing its age in defiance of the urge to be new.  I see a city at peace with its juxtaposed detritus and glorious sunsets; a city okay with buildings and bridges that, at times, vanish slowly into a style of transfixed oblivion. Not to be missed on this journey are the jubilant colors, the capricious displays of pinks, blues, greens, and reds.  Mitty’s use of color wakes us up to the fact that the city may be aging but it is still alive and vibrant and whimsical.

M.S.    What most inspires your work?
L.M.     What inspires me is places that I see, the stories that come to mind, places marked by time and abandonment.  Man juxtaposed with nature.  I’m most excited when I find an unexpected beauty in the everyday, such as you wouldn’t anticipate.  I visit a place over and over again.  A recent example is the view of the Brooklyn Queens Expressway from my studio, with the elevated roadway rising up in an almost heavenly wave.  When I saw the sunset behind it, that’s what made it really fascinating for me—the sun coming through car windows and truck windows transforming this mundane scene into something almost cinematic, car lights in a heavenly rainbow wave.  I like that kind of thing—car lights when you’re riding, and the kind of light reflecting from the road.

M.S.   What part of the process do you find most exciting?
L.M.    Finding an image.  Finding a new image.  Buildings that are being deconstructed near an area where I had been painting are fabulous.  These huge, expansive warehouse type buildings that had big holes punched in them in the process of demolition.  Through the holes I could see images such as the expressway bridge, and views of old industrial places.  All of these walls are covered with graffiti.  It’s that kind of unexpected juxtaposition that gets me really excited.  I know that it’s the start of a series of work.  What I do then is stay there a lot, and keep going back.  I spend a lot of time and take hundreds and hundreds of pictures and make sketches.  That’s a very exciting part of the project.

M.S.   What do you find to be the most stressful part of your work?
L.M.   When I begin in the first stages of the work; when I begin to think about what particular colors I’m going to use and I start to mix color.  I always happen upon a combination of color I’ve never mixed before.  It’s a sort of endless discovery with that.  That excites me a lot because if I can do this thing with that medium, I can manipulate it to get light with color this way.  Then that one will do this, and that one will do that.  I’m always discovering in that way of working.  I also use various materials.  I don’t just work with paint. I use oil sticks, and rags, transparent wax sticks.  There are moments when it occurs to me that a certain thing will do the trick in a certain area.  I love to just discover how to put it into being a new thing that I’m looking at.  It’s like the process of translating something, or extrapolating something.

M.S.   Do you do sketches or an underpainting?
L.M.   I often work from a quick sketch, but in the past I used to work from memory and with it a quick sketch, about 20 minutes.  There’s a lot of memory involved. I started to take pictures. I realized I needed to take thousands of them. The process frequently involves combining photographs together.  I spend days and days before I start a painting, deciding how the image will work best from the information I have.  The initial thought comes, but requires many trips back to the location.  I do do an underpainting.  I never draw on a canvas with pencil or charcoal. I use a lightly toned paint, yellow ochre.  I sketch in total perhaps 20 minutes and then I do a thin underpainting.   After that I do a thick layer.  If you look closely at my work, it has many layers.  Some of the overpainting is very thick.  There’s a lot of transparency and a lot of variation.

M.S.   Do you have a meaning in your paintings other than the obvious?
L.M.   I don’t really.  If I had a meaning I would just write that.  It’s really about the richness of variance, the process and the translation and a way of putting a kind of reality through a kind of web.  I suppose I hope that the viewer thinks about that.  But that’s not something I really think about.  It’s kind of just a very selfish, engaging process.

M.S.   Which part of the creative process do you find most difficult?
L.M.   I guess the moment when I’m sitting down and deciding and when I then first start putting down the mark.  There are always moments when I don’t think it’s working—maybe not in every but in most paintings.  Sometimes I just have to push it and push it.  Sometimes the best painting happens when I reach.  Sometimes that brings the best results.  Other times I’ll get to the point where I have to throw it away.

M.S.   Do you take breaks from your work?
L.M.   While I’m in the studio—I frequently spend all day there—I get up and down a lot and walk away a lot and change position.  I do step back and forth and then when I’m done with a work I hang it up and it stays there for a month or so.  Sometimes shorter, sometimes longer.  Every time I come I look at it and if something triggers a negative feeling, I continue to tweak it until I walk in and feel that it’s finished.  You keep it there and look at it for a long time until it doesn’t bother you.

M.S.   Do you take vacations?
L.M.   Not for long periods.  But we have traveled recently to Spain and Italy and I was in Puerto Rico for five days.  I think it’s pretty healthy to go away and have a change of scene.  When I do go away I look at art.  Of course I look at art in the city, but I love going to the movies and watching HBO.  I read a lot.  Truth is that I would rather read good fiction than look at art most of the time.

M.S.   How would you like to see your work evolve from here?
L.M.   I don’t really feel that I have a choice in the matter because of the way that I evolve.  Sometimes I’m inspired by an image or I’m inspired some work and it might cause me to make a certain work or to try something in a way I haven’t tried before.  The way it works is that each painting tells me something else and it informs the next painting.  Every painting that I do is informed by every painting that I’ve done before it.  It’s really cyclical.  You get a series of work and notice that a primary factor in that series is something that was very, very important thirty years ago. You know, if you look back at my work when I was a student even 18 years old, doing my first oil paintings, they’re so similar and there is so much about them that is still in my work now.  There are certain aspects of perhaps done at a certain time.  It’s just a very cyclical process.

M.S.   Do you have paintings that are favorites, and why?
L.M.   I’ve done a series of paintings from the Red Hook waterfront of factories that were being dismantled.  I’m actually doing a couple more paintings there now.  I actually can’t tear myself away from the place.  I’m kind of interspercing those with Sunset Road.  But I’m going to need to back.  It involves a lot of paint layering and blending back and forth.  By the end of the day I feel like divided.  I’m compelled by two directions and sort of working in two directions.

M.S.   What would you like your audience to take away from viewing your work?
L.M.   Only maybe the way that I feel.  What I feel is joyous.  It reminds me of the feeling everyone has when they go to Paris, over the bay and “hit” the water—an image that’s just striking and startling; the light on an elevated subway, a bizarre color, a flow.  I don’t want the paintings to be about just one thing.  I feel that inevitably they’re about a lot of things.  They’re about the way we live, because they’re images of the way the landscape has happened.  They speak about environmental concerns in an indirect way.  They speak to politics in an indirect way.  But they’re also very formal.  They are very much about color and form and abstraction.  But they are primarily a shocked fury that you have when you see something that’s magnificent.  So it’s all those things and more that I can’t even verbalize.

M.S.   What words of encouragement would you give to emerging painters?
L.M.   You need to discover your own set of processes and images and ways to portray them.  Take this stuff I’ve done and here are some ways you can start.

Mary Soliwoda is a writer originally from upstate New York. She has conducted interviews for twenty years, ghost written a novel, done technical writing for various companies, written hundreds of poems and short stories. She attended SUNY Binghamton majoring in English and Journalism.  She is currently working on an adventure mystery novel set in Niagara Falls, NY.