Liz Whitney Quisgard has created artworks that her gallery describes simultaneously as “Rugs, Tapestries, Quilts” with a size given as”Dimensions vary, 6- 15 feet”. One photo has a room filled with lyrical, mesmerizing wall hangings of Moorish pattern. Her paintings continue this theme on a much larger scale, but without the sensuality of the textile pieces.

“Her fiber wall hangings are made from yarn on buckrum and have lush textured surfaces. These exquisite patterned pieces long to be touched. They are decorative, detailed and have a wonderful color sense transforming the space into a Moroccan palace…There are triangles, squares and geometric patterns in all these works – small dots of vibrant color that form intriguing patterns. The mixed media wall tiles are all this & just fun besides.” Franklin 54 Gallery

In my youthful, truth-seeking days, I wrote reams of justification for my work. Now that the work has matured and I, simultaneously, put less and less value on truth, words have become irrelevant. So, when called upon to explain what I do, I am inclined to say, “what you see is what you get.”

Couched in that flippant response is a firm conviction that the visual arts are exactly that, visual. No meanings. No messages. No preachments. No symbols. Politics, philosophy, the human condition, the environment and other causes about which people paint, perform and sculpt these days are subjects for discourse- best expressed with words. Attempts to transform them into pictorial images tend to become mere illustration – most often jejune.

My goal is to surprise and engage the mind seducing the eye. Toward that end I rely on pattern. The term “decorative” has been applied to my work, most often in a negative sense. But, that’s okay with me, for some of the most important art is essentially decorative. Islamic rugs, Greek column capitols, Navajo textiles, Byzantine mosaics, Baroque architectural embellishments… and so forth.

We all understand a row of triangles, a strip of squares, an arrangement of circles and swirls. No need to ask their meaning. They simply are what they are. They speak to us universally and without apology. Artists’s statement for solo show at Rutgers University (since removed from web)