Elizabeth Stathis
Gainesville, VA
A long term traditional fine artist specializing in commissioned portraitures .
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BIOGRAPHY
Elizabeth Stathis is currently the owner of EAS Art Studio LLC, the 2024 President of Prince William Art Society, the newly elected Executive Director of Art of Life Charities and a member of the Prince William County Arts Council. She is a native of Philadelphia, PA and became interested in art at a young age watching her mother sketch. After jumping from Art I to Art Major in High school, completely skipping Art II, Elizabeth then began taking classes at Moore College of Art and Design in Philadelphia before she even graduated high school. Her work was selected to be exhibited in the MCA boardroom as she was handed her acceptance letter. She graduated with a BFA from Moore and moved to Vermont where she continued to study art at local colleges. She became a co-owner of a Monument business where she designed and etched personalized monuments for 27 years. She also worked freelance for individuals and businesses alike, all while building her own art studio. Once completed she produced art for gallery exhibits up and down the east coast and taught art to private students as well as students in private school settings. Elizabeth continues to submit her art to juried art exhibitions located up and down the east coast and has won awards for First place, Second place, Honorable mention, and Best in Show.
In 2004 she moved to be near DC and worked in art galleries that were in McLean, VA, Fairfax, VA and DC. In 2023 she was elected president of PWAS where she led the society with the vision of “Art with Good Purpose”. This consisted of four core goals: Art education, Art Sales, Socialization, and Giving Back to the Community. She applied for and was awarded three different grants from Prince William County that were based on the use of Healthcare Art as a tool toward mental health awareness and wellness. She chaired multiple fundraising art exhibits that benefitted other Prince William County non-profits that were focused on local water and soil conservation efforts as well as those that preserved native plants and wildlife. She taught a therapeutic art class at The Muslim Association of Virginia, as well as Prince William County libraries and the Benedictine Monastery. She Partnered PWAS with veteran based non-profits such as Willing Warriors and Tunnel to Towers to bring therapeutic art workshops to veterans suffering from PTSD. She also chaired two healthcare art exhibits in two medical facilities that benefitted patient recovery and reduced patient trauma. She is currently working in partnership with the Manassas City Park City Council members to obtain a community grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. She brought into the mix the Prince William County Arts Council to help the city council’s efforts bring art and recognition to their community. Shortly after she began her PWAS presidency, she was asked to be the Executive Director of AOLC, and she is now heavily invested in their fundraisers that recently benefited the local Boxes of Basics charity as well as new art programs aimed at helping those in need. She is a member of the PW Chamber and is working with the Students Serving Seniors group, the chamber's Health and Wellness Council and the Senior Services Committee to launch the Creative Community Connections: Senior Art Expression Workshop. In May of 2024 she was a judge for the Congressional Art Competition hosted by Representative Abigail Spanberger, a judge for this year’s Prince William Water Art Invitational, and was asked to be a panelist on the 2025 Congressional Art Competition hosted by Congressman Eugene Vindman. She is currently working on creating a local art alliance in the western side of PWC, where individual artists and art groups alike can utilize a shared space where all can teach art, hone their art, exhibit their art, and give back to the community by using their art talents for good purpose.
Statement
ARTIST’S STATEMENT
Mankind has had a love affair with dogs ever since we discovered fire and began cooking our meat. Our canine’s ancestors were attracted to the smell and easily became our constant companions, and this delighted us. In fact, the more human-like behavior they exhibited, the more we fell in love with them.
Because that is true, I believe that some of the best of man’s best friends, have been the ones that we asked the owner of the dog if we could please have one of their puppies. This practice then resulted in some of the smartest, funniest, and cutest breeds being bred more often, thus refining the ancestral canine into one of the most loyal and human-like pet that we now have today. Their personalities are as varied as their human owners. They have become our children. We are no longer dog owners, we are “Fur Parents”, or “Pet Parents”.
There are such contracts now that are called, Petnups, which is much like the Prenup. It’s for those couples who would like to know who gets custody, whole or part, of the dog if the pet parents ever decide their relationship isn’t working and they decide to separate.
They pull on our heart strings. They are our family. We know their names and greet them just like we do the rest of the family. We talk to them, discipline them and spoil them. They sleep in our beds and eat our food. We dress them and worry about them. We have them on schedules and make sure we feed them real food that is organic and healthy. We try to keep them with us as long as we can.
I was fortunate enough to not only be born into, but to also marry into, families that love their dogs as much as I do. And there are a lot of dogs!
All my portraits are of the family dogs, and I’ve rendered these portraits in such a way to bring out not just their personality, but the best, the brightest, and the cutest aspect of each dog. I‘ve varied the mediums, the lighting, the perspective, and the pose, to emphasize this in each piece.
“Daphne” is a perfect example. My son brought this little Rat Terrier home one day as a very young pup. The first thing that I noticed was that she had a tiny stump of a tail. This little tail stump made her little rear end appear round and plump. Adorable. I felt the best way of emphasizing this adorable feature was to have the viewer looking down at her while she was snuggled into a dark blanket. On black pastel paper, I used the pastel in a sculpture-like stroke to highlight the roundness of her little canine derriere. Her head is turned slightly as if to curiously look at the viewer as we were curiously looking at her. A very human-like pose, as well as communicative.
It was evident that there was an unspoken, and delightful, interaction between a canine and her humans.