Portrait by Fenn Bruns
hello!
My name is Elise Coatney.
I am a multi-disciplinary visual artist who creates an ecosystem of oil painting, wood sculpture, graphic design, and photography. Central to my practice is what I consider devotion to the outdoors; attention towards, meditation on, and worship of wild spaces.
I studied Fine Art in both Graphic Design and Studio Art at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo. Inspired by the natural landscape of California’s central coast, I live and work in the area, gathering imagery from the untamed coast and winding oak trees around me.
Artist Statement
I’m stirred by the unmistakable divinity of the wilderness, especially the cycles of genesis and destruction that march on as incessantly as time. In the glisten of a morning web, a forest set ablaze, or water waning cliffs, lessons of power, change, and freedom are put on display.
My process of gathering imagery for artwork is akin to collecting stones on a beach. Intimate moments in nature grab my attention, and I read them as signs to decode. In my paintings, I analyze these naturally occurring forms of the outdoors, which speak an ornamentally beautiful language of their own. When painted on the panels, they coalesce in and out of pattern and reality.
I seek systems in nature that mimic our own human relationships, comparing the power dynamics and cycles that weave throughout telescoping scales of existence. These similarities have a double edge; they reveal both the levity and the profundity of what concerns our species.
As the earth is plagued by human greed, waging violence against land, animals, and people alike, we are observing a slow slaughter committed by our own hands. Yet there is beauty to be found even in this destruction, and the constant churn of nature’s clock urges us to accept. I seek out this bitter-sweet peace that emerges when control is relinquished.