Liz Abbott

Liz is a local Otago artist who works full-time from her home-based studio on Muaūpoko/Otago Peninsula. This provides the inspiration for her original oil paintings, pastels and drawings. 

In 2003 Liz gained a Master of Fine Arts in painting at Otago Polytechnic after graduating with a Diploma of Fine Arts (Honours) in printmaking in 1989. Since then she has held regular solo exhibitions including one at the Hocken Library and the Marshall Seifert Gallery in Dunedin.

A well-known New Zealand painter, she has twice won the Telecom Art Awards in the Otago region and won the Cleveland Small Works Award in 2005. Other awards include the Otago Polytechnic Croda Printmaking Award (1988), the North Shore City Art Awards (2005), the ILT pastel award (2016), the Ashburton Society of Arts’ Miniature award (2017) and the Dunedin Dream Brokerage Artist Bubbles Project winner (2020). Her work has been reviewed in Art New Zealand (Spring 2005) and in the Listener (June 25 2005) and is represented in private and public collections both in NZ and overseas.

Liz’s solo exhibition “Fanny & Me” at the Hocken Library in 2006 featured a series of both miniature and very large oil paintings Liz made in response to the work of nineteenth century painter Fanny Brunton from her sketchbook in the Hocken Pictorial Collections. 

“Liz’s work in this exhibition is inspired by her own journeys and still moments of observation on holidays and within daily life, echoing Fanny’s process of sketching within moments of freedom from domestic concerns…Fanny and Liz’s works viewed in unison, invite philosophical contemplation. Life, our small time on this planet, we are reminded, is simultaneously big and small, dark and light, linear as a highway and circular as history. Whatever view is taken, our passions are what anchor us, and in Liz and Fanny’s case, this is, and was, their art.”  (Fanny And Me: Exhibition Catalogue Essay by Janine Cook, 2006)