Elizabeth Mumford's paintings present us with our own American culture, past and present, in joyful vignettes which delight us with their innocent playfulness. Framed by quotations from Franklin and Emerson, sea chanteys, Bible verses, and conventional New England wisdom, the paintings simultaneously illustrate their texts and are enhanced by them.
Mumford says of her own development as an artist that while her early work could have been categorized as "primitive," her style has evolved into a much more sophisticated awareness of compositional balance of color and line. Her partial abandonment of linear perspective, with a resulting creation of flat areas of vivid colors, enables her to remain a representational artist while at the same time she can exploit the placement of color as would an abstract artist.
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