Art New England: Studio Visit
November/December 2025
By Carl Little
Elizabeth Awalt in her Swans Island studio. Photo: Jack Ledbetter.
On a sunny early September morning, Elizabeth Awalt’s studio near the Swans Island shore is filled with light—and with the fruit of a busy summer of painting. Canvases small and large hang on or are propped against the white walls; they are also spread out on small tables along with studies and painting materials. The 500-square-foot space is set up for work, for exploring, for invention. From the deck of the studio, one looks out on the Sister Islands, part of Maine’s remarkable archipelago, in outer Blue Hill Bay. The setting is breathtaking, a landscape painter’s paradise.
While plein air painting is a passion, in recent years the sea has played an increasingly important role in Awalt’s art. She goes underwater for some of her subjects, scuba diving and snorkeling (she got her certification for the former at age sixty). Considering the devastation of reefs around the world, she has been fortunate to find beautiful sea life off Little Cayman Island and in Palau in Micronesia where she visited Einstein’s Garden with its colorful brain coral (hence the reference to the famous physicist).
Over the summer, Awalt snorkeled off Swans Island, donning a wetsuit to brave the chilly Atlantic. Sharing some underwater videos, she points out the paradoxical beauty of an invasive sponge-like growth on a local dock. Several biologists on the island have helped identify the marine flora. Awalt has been using strips of kelp in some of her newest works, using the seaweed as a kind of resist or template to form shapes. The kelp has a lot of alginate, a gluey substance that leaves some residue on the surface and does things the artist would not expect. She also uses seawater, which creates interesting textures. She embraces unusual effects. For her two-person show with C. Michael Lewis at the University of New England Gallery in Biddeford last spring, Awalt showed paintings of coral and tropical fish. In a statement, she noted how sketching plein eau allowed her “to gain an intimacy with the natural world as witness, observer, and recorder.”
In a recent painting, Ebb and Flow, Awalt conjures the swirling underwater ecosystem where seaweed twists and turns in the tides. “I always wanted to be an abstract painter,” she explains, “and yet I want to look at the world and connect with it and be in it.” The undersea subject matter fits this desire because “in and of itself,” she says, “it’s so crazy abstract.” Awalt considers her paintings to be “a conduit to experiences in nature, a way to explore the dynamic evolution of a range of environments.” She layers, pours and scrapes, “inviting,” she writes, “immediacy and memory to exist in equal parts.” Her approach “echoes cycles of organic growth and decay and current destructive impacts on our environment.” She wants her paintings to invoke “a world of beauty, chaos, and turbulence, and to invite viewers to take note of their surroundings whether on land or beneath the waves.”
Elizabeth Awalt, Ebb and Flow, 2025, ink and acrylic on paper, 45 x 45″. Photo: Julia Featheringill.
Awalt cherishes her time on Swans Island where she has been spending summers for nearly forty years. When the island library burned to the ground after a lightning strike in 2008,she gathered some of the scorched pages scattered around the building and invited islanders and artists to use them to create works to be auctioned to help fund reconstruction. The new library, designed by Stewart Brecher, opened in 2011.
Returning to her studio in Concord, MA, Awalt will bring some summer work that needs resolving along with drawings and watercolors that may end up becoming paintings. She used to do more outdoor studies to be developed in the winter, yet nowadays she prefers to make the paintings on site. A photograph on her website shows a watercolor set-up on the prow of her kayak. On or below the water, she’s out there.
—Carl Little
The artist is represented by Caldbeck Gallery in Rockland, Maine.
