PRESS
Summer on 4th Street
Growing up in Hong Kong and Canada in a family of artists, Elizabeth Gorek had a diverse palette of experiences to draw from. She paints in her barn studio in Ross or in the historic Sam the Butcher art space, where the public — including kids on the way home from school — are free to watch her work. “I aim to capture a moment wherever I can find one,” says Gorek, a former finalist. “For this painting I was drawn by the fact that a couple can be so close and yet so far away from each other.”
FINALIST MARIN MAGAZINE COVER 2014
Artists are a mystery to those of us with more prosaic lives. While we commute to our cubicles in the downtown towers of business districts, the lucky few in the artistic community retire to their ateliers, breathe deep the air of imagination and let the muse of creativity lead them through the day. Or so we fantasize. That's why when painters, sculptors and weavers open their studios to the public, we flock to them like curious visitors to a carnival sideshow. Oh, see how they live! There are their paints! What whimsical furniture! Of course, open studios allow us to see wonderful works of art up close and meet their creators firsthand, but the voyeur who lives in all of us‚ "the one who surreptitiously peeks into the closets of friends (and don't we all?) ‚" is thrilled most by the backstage pass into this normally cloistered corner of the art world. Perhaps the paint-spattered floors will reveal the key to innovation? Maybe the pungent varnishes will awaken dormant inspiration? Could that rack of half-finished canvases spur completion of our own inchoate dreams? Artists answer those questions in their studios by arranging them to do the one thing for which these creative spaces exist: work… (partial excerpt)
COVER Marin Magazine | May 2010 | article partial excerpt