Liz Hamilton

PO Box 193
Lunenburg NS B0J 2C0
902-634-4093
h.house@ns.sympatico.ca

Medium: acrylic, papier maché

Subjects: various

My need to create goes back to childhood when I spent hours sawing and painting boards to build “paddle steamers” which we sailed on the frog pond. I’ve always been sketching, building, cartooning, writing and painting - always working on something I called art. It’s only the last few years that I’ve been selling some of my work.

I have had no art training - just the audacity to try, with my only guidance coming from Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. I believe art is like hockey. Many people play. It satisfies a need, but few make a living at it, and fewer still become stars. So it is with art but that does not deter me, for I was born with the need to create.

My first bold venture, the “Fundy Coast Ghosts” were characters which appeared out of driftwood. They bought me some woodworking tools and so there followed a period of furniture building. Next, the urge to work with papier mache brought about the creation of many fish. And so it goes -the next phase has yet to appear, but always there is drawing and painting.

I had always wanted to make something out of papier mache. So I said to myself, “How hard can it be?” I got a box of wallpaper paste, a bag of balloons, some newspaper, and headed for the basement. I coated a balloon and hung it by the furnace to dry. I think it was at that point that I realized I needed to decide what it was I was making. As I continued to work on my project, I decided I was making a balloon of papier mache. Somewhere along the line I thought perhaps it would make into a fish of some sort.

It takes well over 100 hours to make one fish - and that is spread out over three months or so - and only if one works on it every day. Four years and some two hundred fish later I have decided that it’s time to create some new art work. Fish from now on are made upon individual request, while I decide upon my next endeavour.