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The Glass Coffin: Liza Corbett Revisited
Below are some recent works from one of my longtime favorites, Liza Corbett. Her fanciful watercolors enchant me with their elegant, melancholy surrealism, sweeping, willowy lines, and languid Victorian ladies. I especially like the motif of eyes peering out of women’s skirts, as if their vestiture were a kind of morbid extension of their bodies/selves. Her delicately lovely images put me in mind of spiritualist seances, mythological stories where women are transformed into animals, and the membranous veil, as diaphanous as her art, between the living and deathly realms. I love the artist’s statement on her site, which elaborates:
{Liza Corbett’s work contemplates The Summer-Land, the spirit world that lays unseen alongside our own. She creates visual narratives populated with otherworldly women and animals, under heavy suns in hazy, wan skies. Her subject matter is tinged with the menace of pre-modern life and suffused with an air of melancholy. Influenced by nineteenth-century spiritualism, by Dark Romanticism, and by myths, fables and old tales, Liza aims to create images that, like tarot or other methods of divination, suggest a strange and impenetrable significance underlying our worldly existence.}
