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Intuitive & Colorful Works of Liz Maltman

When Liz Maltman set up for the 2015 Door County Plein Air Festival’s two-hour “Quick Paint” last summer in front of a beautiful garden in Sister Bay, she wasn’t drawn to the well manicured, nicely planted flowers that inspired the colorful creations of her fellow painters.

She was drawn to an out-of-control weed that had sprouted up amongst those nicely planted flowers.

“It had grown four feet higher than any of the other plants and I thought it was funny,” Maltman recalled. “I thought, that weed really wants to be seen.”

"Cottage with Birds" by Liz Maltman.

“Cottage with Birds” by Liz Maltman.

By the end of those two hours, anyone who hadn’t seen the weed in person would be able to see it immortalized on Maltman’s canvas.

That knack for putting the odd and out-of-place front and center is a defining element of the longtime Door County artist’s colorful landscapes. Maltman is largely a plein air painter who has been part of the peninsula’s art scene since 1975. Her first 30 years here were filled with a variety of jobs in the silent sports realm, restaurant circuit, education and retail, along with a gig managing the Hardy Gallery and owning and managing her own women’s art-to-wear clothing store, The Magic Jacket.

It wasn’t until 2004 that she discovered landscape painting en plein air, and it is that discovery that has led to showings at a number of galleries on the peninsula, including her newest gallery representation at Fine Line Designs Gallery, where her work is currently on display in the gallery’s first exhibit of the season.

While typical plein air painters obey the confines of their canvas when recreating the scene before them, Maltman has no reservations about incorporating elements from a 360-degree view. In that way, her paintings are very loose representations of Door County’s landscapes with a highly imaginative use of color.

“Crow and Sailboat" by Liz Maltman.

“Crow and Sailboat” by Liz Maltman.

Maltman does not restrict herself with structure or color, calling herself an “intuitive” painter who creates at her best when she is in the moment and has a couple hundred pastels at her disposal (she also works in oil and acrylic, but is drawn to pastels because of their immediacy).

“The color’s just kind of there right in front of you so it’s easy to grab a color and just try it,” Maltman says of pastels. “Whereas with paint, you end up having to mix a color; there’s more thought involved in a way. I like to not really have to think. I like to just see what happens.”

It’s not difficult to see how Maltman’s biggest artistic inspiration – post-Impressionist painters, particularly Vincent van Gogh and Les Nabis (a group of rebellious French avant-garde artists from the 1890s) – comes out in her work. While she employs just five or six colors in each piece, the liberal use and thick stroke of these colors results in colorful explosions of trees, leaves, skies, flowers, the occasional human and more recently, birds.

How these all come out depends on the weather. Maltman is most drawn to the dramatic lighting of early morning and late evening but will create at any time of the day and in most any weather.

"October Field" by Liz Maltman.

“October Field” by Liz Maltman.

“If it’s really windy, I’ll probably paint it much quicker and if it’s a really quiet, calm day, I might take the whole day to do one painting,” she said. “And the feel of it would be really different than if it was windy and cold, for example.”

And if the weather isn’t conducive for painting outdoors, she draws from her imagination and inspiration from the outdoors.

Maltman’s colorful creations are currently on display as part of Fine Line Designs Gallery’s Exhibit I. She is also an invited artist of Miller Art Museum’s 7th Annual Door Prize for Portraiture and the Hardy Gallery Collection Invitational. Maltman will also participate in the Door County Plein Air Festival, sponsored by the Peninsula School of Art, in late July and have her artwork on display throughout the summer at The Cookery in Fish Creek.

For more on Liz Maltman’s artwork, visit LizandRick.com.

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