Elizabeth de Bethune
Yonkers, NY
I mostly paint pictures of people, often folks in the LGBTQ+ community. I focus on an intimate world and the people in my life.
Message
Elizabeth de Bethune is a representational/figurative painter from Yonkers, New York. Here recent exhibitions include “Out in Orient, Portraits of the North Fork Women’s Community”, Garrison Art Center, Garrison NY, September 20-October 19, 2025; “Out, In, a Series of Portraits” at the Yonkers Riverfront Art Gallery, Yonkers, NY, June, 2025; “Intimate and Ordinary”, at the Rye Art Center, in May 2024, and “Out in Yonkers, Portraits from the Yonkers LGBTQ Community” at the White Plains Public Library Museum Gallery, January and February 2024. Participation in recent group exhibitions have included Women’s History Month, Moving Forward Together! Women Educating and Inspiring Generations, March, 2025, Islip Arts Council, Islip NY; “Open Call”, ArtsWestchester, February 2025, White Plains NY; “Iconic Portraits; Figures in the Modern World”,Project Space, Yonkers Arts, November-December, 2024, Yonkers NY; 8–9/2024 “Look Harder, See More”,Bristol Art Museum, Bristol RI, August-September, 2024.
Elizabeth 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 participated in residencies in monotype printing at Women’s’ Studio Workshop (2003, 2005) and Vermont Studio Center (2006). 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, she is presently on the faculty of the Pelham Art Center. She attended the Chautauqua Visual Arts Residency in August, 2025.
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 within in a space, and the implied story, is the heart of my narrative impulse. Although I have been painting my whole life, I retired from teaching four and a half years ago to devote myself to paint people. 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.