elizabeth de bethune

Website: www.elizabethdebethuneart.com

Instagram: @lizartdeb
Email: erdebethune@gmail.com

STATEMENT

I am a Yonkers, New York based representational painter, making pictures of quotidian life; the people, places, and things I know. My imagery develops from observation and daily cell-phone photographic notetaking; they reflect my vision and experience and note the poignancy in our awareness of the ordinary. I work two-dimensionally with paint, drawing materials, collage, and printmaking, within a painterly realist vernacular, with an active drawn line and open brush stroke. Although my images are often illusionistic, I stay connected to their objectness. I am influenced by modernist representation’s informal, subjective, and cinematographic qualities.

People engaged in a space, and the implied story, is the heart of my narrative impulse. Presently, I am fascinated by the psychological space in portrait painting. My subjects are usually intimate and casual—my family and close friends, almost all of whom are in the LGBTQ world, going about their daily life. During a visit to the Uffizi in Florence, I was particularly struck by two Bronzini portraits of young girls—something about them really drove home to me that these had been living, breathing people alive some 500 years ago. The portraits were like time capsules from the 16th century reaching out to me in the 21st. I wanted to make similar time capsules that will live on into the future. Because I am a member of the LGBTQ community, often my work becomes about queer representation, in an attempt to dignify our diverse truths.

Much of my recent work has series of formal portraits of a given community. In 2023, with support from an ArtsAlive grant from ArtsWestchester, I painted “Out in Yonkers”, a series of 12 portraits of the Yonkers LGBTQ community. This was followed by “Out in Orient” in 2024 and 2025, which uses portraiture to document a large women’s’ community on the North Fork of Long Island. This developed in the mid 20th century as a quieter, more affordable space for women to gather, and is now threatened by gentrification and aging. I felt it important to make paintings of the women who are there now, before the community disappears. This series is ongoing; I have painted 16 portraits thus far, and hope for more. With both of these series, I have scaled the portraits so that when they are displayed together, it feels as though they are having a conversation with each other.

BIOGRAPHY

Elizabeth de Bethune is a painter from Yonkers, New York. She has a BA in Fine Art, (Yale University 1979) and an MFA in Painting and Drawing (SUNY Purchase 1991), with additional studies at the New York Studio School, Brooklyn College, with the painter Brenda Goodman, and Manhattan Graphics Center (scholarship). She has had fellowships in monotype printing at Women’s’ Studio Workshop (2003, 2005) and Vermont Studio Center (2006) and painting (Chautauqua Visual Arts, 2025). She was an inaugural member of the Bronx River Art Center Artist Studio Program and a part of the Yonkers-based YoHo Studios community for many years. A former NYCDOE Art Teacher, Elizabeth presently teaches at the Pelham Art Center. She has exhibited locally and regionally.

Recent one-person exhibitions have included “Out in Orient, Portraits of the North Fork Women’s Community”, Garrison Art Center, Garrison’s Landing, New York, (September-October, 2025); “Out/In” at the Riverfront Library Art Gallery, Yonkers, New York, (June-July, 2025); “Intimate and Ordinary”, at the Rye Art Center, (May 2024); “Small Landscapes, Art in Healing Program” at Cooley-Dickenson Hospital, Northampton, Massachusetts (March-April, 2025); and “Out in Yonkers, Portraits from the Yonkers LGBTQ Community” at the White Plains Public Library Museum Gallery, (January-February, 2024).