Elizabeth Barlow grew up in an art-filled home surrounded by a flower garden. Her late father was the artist Philip Barlow, and her parents were art collectors. She spent her childhood in Salt Lake City, and went on to earn her Bachelor of Arts degree at the University of Utah, followed by a Masters’ degree at the University of Virginia. After living in England for a time, she returned to the United States, eventually settling in San Francisco. In the Bay Area Barlow continued her arts education at UC Berkeley Extension where she earned a Post Baccalaureate Certificate in Visual Arts with distinction. In 2007 she spent time studying at the Art Students League in New York City. She came to the Monterey Peninsula in 2016, and now works out of a studio situated in a historic church in Carmel-by-the-Sea.

Barlow is a contemporary still-life artist working in oils. Her paintings begin with a pencil sketch on an oil-primed, custom-made French linen canvas. Next she sets down an alla prima (initial wet on wet) layer of color. Multiple glazed layers follow, a meticulous and time-consuming practice that results in works of luminosity and depth. She considers her still life paintings more akin to portraiture, and her successful series Portraits in Absentia takes the genre in a new direction. For these, she creates carefully composed arrangements of her subject’s most meaningful possessions, often in collaboration with them. Portraits in Absentia have included such things as lipstick, jewelry, clothing, shoes, golf balls, and more.

A commission for a garden portrait led Barlow to her current series Flora Portraits, now her primary focus. She collects blossoms, arranges and photographs them, then spends many hours creating a composition. The attention and concentration required to accurately paint small blooms at a much larger scale gives her access to a world revealed only by slowing down and looking closely. Barlow believes that this process is also a transformative practice in mindfulness and presence, and that by looking deeply we will develop a reverence for all living things, something especially needed today as we navigate the challenges of climate change. Her six-foot Flora portrait, The Phoenix Rose, was commissioned to honor a spectacular rosebush that survived a devastating California vineyard fire; an important memento of renewal and hope for its owner.

Elizabeth Barlow is represented by Andra Norris Gallery in Burlingame, CA. Her work is held in public and corporate collections including The Absinthe Group, San Francisco, CA; the Lucille Packard Children’s Hospital at Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA; San Francisco Opera, San Francisco, CA; and the Community Hospital of the Monterey Peninsula, Monterey, CA. She gains inspiration from artists Georgia O’Keeffe, Martha Alf, Johannes Vermeer, and Chilean artist Claudio Bravo, but her father Philip Barlow remains her most revered teacher and principal artistic influence.