Liz Butler was born in Cumbria and educated at Liverpool College of Art and the Royal College of Art. She is well known for her miniature paintings of gardens, and her use of pure watercolour.
Her work is held in several major collections including the Government Art Collection, Abbot Hall Gallery, Kendal, the Royal Collection, Harewood House, Qingdao Art Museum, China, the National Postal Archive and the Chelsea Physic Garden. She was elected a Member of the Royal Watercolour Society in 1996, where she exhibits regularly in their Annual Spring and Autumn Exhibitions. She was elected to the Small Paintings Group in 2018.
The Francis Kyle Gallery in Mayfair represented her from 1978, until they closed in 2014. She had three solo exhibitions there and exhibited regularly in their mixed themed exhibitions.
Four of her paintings were selected for an exhibition at the RWA, Bristol, entitled “Air, Visualising the Invisible in British Art 1768 - 2017.” They were part of a series of paintings entitled Fragile Earth, which were painted from material she had collected from various aeroplane flights, and is an ongoing project. The changing of the earth over time, through climate and geological change is of great interest to her, as are patterns in nature. She continues to work on this series and has been working on some aerial views of the Siberian Steppes.
From 2020-2023 she worked on a project, culminating in an exhibition “350 years of the Chelsea Physic Garden”, exhibited at Bankside Gallery in June 2023. Her painting “The Rambler” was bought by the Chelsea Physic Garden for their collection.
“I like my paintings to look as though they have been made by magic, avoiding any visible brush marks. I mainly work in watercolour, sometimes I draw with a pencil, but I prefer to go straight in with the brush. Like handwriting, the language an artist uses, in the making of a painting, is very definitely his or her own. Even if the materials they use and their working methods have much in common with those used by other artists, there is always something in their paintings which defines their identity.”
The Small Paintings Group © 2024
