Liz Gill Neilson
Liz Gill Neilson’s work centers on a practice of locating idea-shapes that emanate from inside the body in response to places in nature, thoughts, and music. Her body of work selected for the Natural Resonance Festival is a selection of mixed media and digital collages corresponding to songs from Planetudes’ first two albums, and the process pieces that created the work. The goal of the series for Planetudes is to evoke both the feeling tone of each piece of music, alongside elements that would clearly bring into focus the landscape or animal entities portrayed in the music.
Liz is a painter and graphic designer based in Portland, Oregon, USA. She is a co-partner and Creative Director of The Beauty Shop, a graphic design agency, and has degrees in fine art and communication design from Columbia University in New York, and the Pacific Northwest College of Art.
Dawn of the Fawn
Lunaverse
The Silk Lady
Invocation
Butterfly Zone
Owl Night
Sea of Tranquility
Morning
Process
The art for Planetudes all started with this painting. It functions as a kind of key, in which every track on each of the first two Planetudes albums is represented as one of 16 sections. The shapes in each section of the painting are then used as graphic elements in the individual artwork created for each song. A version of the full “planet” also appears on the album cover artwork.
Other paintings and drawings also became process work for the song art; these two helped us work out the imagery for “Morning” and “Lunaverse.”
A waterfall sketch for Ouzel, and a landscape for The Silk Lady
The healing power of realistic nature imagery—
When I was first experimenting with the look of Planetudes, my father-in-law Duncan, a nature and wildlife photographer, and dad of Duncan from Planetudes, was part of a study that revealed photographic imagery of nature to have a measurable effect in healing for people in medical environments, more so by far than any other type of art. We realized we wanted some of that healing power in this work; so we brought Duncan into the process as a collaborator, using his photography in many of these pieces. You can visit his work here.