Chaparral Fine Art - Featured Artists

Louisa McElwain

Louisa McElwain has lived and painted in New Mexico since 1985. She works outdoors under a wide variety of conditions, setting up her often immense canvases in the back of her pick-up truck. A lover of nature, Ms. McElwain welcomes the way light, wind, heat and cold bring life into her paintings. Insects, leaves, and soil often end up in the thick layers of fresh paint, an addition the artist sees as a valuable contribution to her work. She will sometimes add such elements intentionally, pressing small stones, bones, pieces of glass or plants into the paint, in the tradition of Navajo weavers who incorporate natural objects into their blankets.
"A painting is like frozen choreography," she says, "like ballet that you can see all in one moment." To capture this contained motion, Ms. McElwain works quickly, completing even her largest paintings in less than four hours. For years, she has created exclusively with palette knives and trowels, tools that allow her to paint with speed and precision. This singular technique also gives her paintings rich texture and lush, sensuous surface.
Ms. McElwain's work has received numerous honors, including being featured on the cover of Southwest Art in 2000.