About Chicago Fine Artist — Liz Mares

Art has always been about construction for me. Not just in the obvious sense — though yes, there is something deeply satisfying about the physical act of building a piece, whether I’m working with line, layering collage, or dragging oil pastel across paper. I mean construction in a broader sense: the idea that the work figures itself out through the making, not before it. I don’t start with a resolved concept and execute it. I start with materials and instinct, and something emerges.

I’ve been doing this for over twenty years. The work has moved through a lot of territories — precise geometric minimalism, abstract oil pastel drawings, digital and analog collage — and for a long time I thought that range was a problem. The art world tends to want you to be one thing, consistently, and I felt that pressure. Eventually, it got loud enough that I stopped hearing myself. I made less. I questioned more. For a while, I was making art for everyone except myself, which is a good way to stop making art altogether.

What pulled me back was getting honest about how I actually work. The geometric minimalism and the rough oil pastel drawings and the collage aren’t different versions of me — they’re all the same impulse expressed through different materials. I’m drawn to line. I’m drawn to the way things fit together to form something larger than their parts. That thread runs through everything I make, regardless of what it looks like on the surface.

I’m back. The work is the most focused it’s ever been, even when it looks loose. I know what I’m doing and why.

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Liz Mares (b. 1978) is a practicing artist and Certified Oncology Esthetician based in the greater Chicago area. Her work has been collected & exhibited in galleries across five continents over a career spanning more than two decades.