One of the highlights of art happenings in the Tampa Bay region is when area museums join forces to produce the Skyway exhibitions. 2024 marks the third iteration. For this version, five area art institutions are simultaneously presenting artwork by artists that live in the Tampa Bay region. It is always a wonderful journey seeing new work by familiar artists who have lived and exhibited in the area for decades and to experience current art from a host of new names.
One of the artists in the former category is Elisabeth Condon (born Los Angeles, 1959) who is exhibiting at both USF’s Contemporary Art Museum through November 23rd and The Ringling through January 2025. Her BFA is from the Otis Art Institute of Parsons School of Design and her MFA The School of The Art Institute of Chicago, and from 2003 to 2014 she was a tenured professor the University of South Florida in Tampa. For the last twenty years, we who live in Florida have been able to enjoy her innovative artwork. Condon’s Florida exhibitions included Tampa’s Beaker Gallery (2003, 2004), Emerson Dorsch Gallery, Miami (2012, 2017, 2019, 2021, 2023), the Bob Rauschenberg Gallery in Fort Myers (2009), and the Tampa Museum of Art (2017), among so many others. She now spends her time between New York and Tampa.
It’s difficult not to enjoy Condon’s effervescent paintings. Her dynamic use of color, layered abstraction, and the blending of Eastern and Western artistic traditions produce vibrant and fluid compositions that evoke a sense of movement and transformation.
She draws inspiration from various sources including Chinese scroll painting, vintage decor, and Postwar abstraction. Building on a multilayered poured base that adds depth and movement, real and fantastic nature bursts forth in such exuberance that it has been likened to Glam Rock. Flamboyant and fun, they capture you with their energy and cheerfulness, then keep you engaged with insight and dimension. Her paintings put forth the idea of landscape as a flowing construction of fantastical ideas, a current of vivacity and enthusiasm.
One of the defining features is her use of color. She uses rich and saturated hues that give her works depth and light. Thin washes of paint interplay with thicker strokes to suggest the processes of nature and time.
In her words: “What I hope my work offers others is what I seek in it myself: surprise. By surprise I mean a new way to view something, its material construction, how one thinks about it that comes through the work itself. I am looking for more than what’s expected. This doesn’t mean innovation but rather deep improvisation that feels weird and exciting. It could be a change in scale, in color, a pattern. I like how a painting can creep up on you then you don’t stop thinking about it.”
She is the recipient of the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors grant, a Pollack Krasner Foundation Grant, and the Florida Individual Artist Fellowship. Her paintings are in the permanent collections of the Hudson River Museum, Tampa Museum of Art, Perez Art Museum in Miami, United States Embassy in Beijing, among others.
Upcoming opportunities to follow her work include the Untitled art fair in December in Miami, and a solo exhibition at the artist-run space Fiendish Plots in Lincoln, Nebraska, as well as an exciting public art project. Ever improvisational and pushing boundaries, these new works will include her established methods of pours and images on the themes of East meets West, while also playing with wet lines of color and new polymer pours incorporating found shells and debris from the beach, a place that has been on all of our minds these days post storms.
Her advice for emerging artists? “As a young artist, some advice I received resonated and some did not, because one’s path is one’s own. So in the largest sense I say, embrace the course that makes you feel excited and free, and give it everything you’ve got.”
Good advice for everything important in life…give it everything you’ve got. •
