Le Refuge Painting

Born in Sydney, early education and art courses in Rome, later Abbotsleigh, Wahroonga under Betty Archdale as Head Mistress. Worked in Hong Kong, traveled to London, and spent three years flying with Qantas as an international hostess and then three years living in Singapore. Taught sketching and drawing at a young age in Rome, she enthusiastically nurtured it through future school years, Liz took this most important and essential armory of a fine artist and started painting in oil with Brian Agnew in 1979 where she learnt traditional landscape art. Under Liz Nicholson, there are works from this period in UK, USA, Canada and Australia. Changing her "˜nom de plume' to Muir in the 90's entertained the next phase of her career. She dedicated herself to watercolor, spending two years working with Helen Goldsmith, one of Australia's top four female watercolor artists. Worked with acrylic in 1996 at Willoughby Workshop with models, toning up, sketching and figure work. Finally under advice of galleries moved back to oil in 1998. Working on her own in her studio she moved from a passion to an obsession. Heavily influenced by Rothko (USA), David Williams (Australia) and Monet, Liz works on site using sketches, watercolor notes, swatch samples, color mixing and photos taken during many delivery trips around the coast and country areas of New South Wales, Queensland and Victoria. Liz's paintings start quite quickly and when the ideas are down, comes in with thick oil for texture then pure pigment and oil glazes for intense color and sheen, finishing with either oil varnish, damar varnish or resins, methods that are guaranteed to last for decades. Whilst Liz still paints all forms of fine art genre, she is drawn to the impasto impressionist and contemporary using oils on canvas(all products used are archival).