Elizabeth Khorey received her Bachelor of Arts degree in Art History from University of California, Santa Barbara in 1986. Between the years of 1986-1990 she has worked in diverse fields of art and interior design.  Her positions have included production manager and artistic assistant to fine artists, intern assistant for the Newport Harbor Art Museum on exhibition installations and research, interior designer/color consultant to various Orange County interior design firms.

 

In 1990, Elizabeth studied the decorative arts and applied painted finishes at the Day Studio in San Francisco. Her training included a wide range of technical skills for "faux finish" applications rendered on interior and exterior surface, and furniture. Along with these artisan disciplines, she was professionally trained in color analysis, color mixing, color specification and old world Venetian plaster techniques. Immediately following this event, she began her decorative artist career in Southern California.  The history of exquisite craftsmanship in the decorative arts throughout the ages has been her ideal and the model for her own company.

 

Elizabeth has transported her artisan skills and sensibilities in textural mediums to her encaustic panels. Her paintings are a dynamic amalgamation of dense opaque and transparent textural layers that vary between plasters, paints, pure beeswax and Damar resin. Encaustic is a molten wax medium that is applied hot, fused with heat and cooled. Each applied layer is semi-destroyed with scraping or re-heating and is then built up again with another application of wax or paint. Within each layer, she embeds and incises simple abstract forms or organic objects. The historical precedent of encaustic painting attracted her due to its translucent and sculptural capabilities as well as its integrity among artists throughout the centuries. Self-taught, she enjoys the artistic and intuitive challenge of the spontaneous dimensionality of encaustic. Elizabeth is intrigued with beauty, decoration and the serenity that emerges from looking at organic forms in nature. The element of mystery that permeates the encaustic medium combined with Elizabeth's sublime eye for color and design generate a matchless creative endeavor of form and color on wood panels.