Liz Hough takes inspiration from the rugged Cornish landscape, especially that which surrounds her home in St Ives. St Ives has a celebrated history of drawing artists who work to abstract the Cornish landscape and Liz Hough is very much continuing this Modern British tradition.

Liz Hough was born in 1966. Studied Fine Art at Manchester, then completed her Post Graduate studies at the RA Schools in 1991. Her achievements include Leverhulme Trust and Landseer Scholarships, Daler Rowney Prize at the RA Summer Exhibition and Creswick Prize for Landscape Painting at the Royal Academy Premiums Exhibition. Liz tutors at the St Ives School of Painting and regularly runs “Abstraction in the Landscape” courses in Tuscany, Italy.

Liz is drawn to the contrast offered up by Cornwall, ‘it’s so beautiful but there is a harshness that intertwines with it. Not only the capricious light and weather, but the poverty and the scars left by the mining industry,’ says Liz. Her work investigates the architecture of the landscape in an almost geological manner. She is inspired by ‘the bones of the landscape,’ the great blocks of granite left in a long-forgotten quarry, the decaying tin mines, the erosion which bites into the edges of the coast. She sees these elements as indicators of story, the process of painting becoming a form of re-telling. Liz is interested in the way the landscape seems to reclaim these man-made interruptions, re-wilding them, interpolating them back into the earth.