Elizabeth Drayson is a British artist whose work explores the history of places and people through portraits, landscapes and abstraction, and seeks to uncover the essential nature of historical subjects, including famous personages, significant places and events, often set in their past context, using oil paint and mixed media.
About
My Story
Tis all a chequerboard of nights and days, where destiny with men for pieces plays, Hither and thither moves and mates and slays, and one by one back in the closet lays. Omar Khayyam
I began to see history as a visual narrative much earlier than I’d realized. When I was twelve, I won a book illustration prize at school for a painting that represented these lines from Omar Khayyam’s famous Rubaiyyat. The seeds of all my future research, writing and painting were there in that illustration, itself an artistic interpretation of the history that the Persian poet described.
Painting History, Writing History
As a lecturer in medieval Spanish history and culture at the University of Cambridge, where I taught until 2020, I wrote books that focused on Spain’s vexed past as both a Christian and Islamic country, that aimed to reveal an alternative history shaped by its ambiguous identity. The crystallization of these ideas in my writing coincided with a sea-change in my evolution as an artist. As a Diploma graduate of the Norfolk Painting School run by the acclaimed British artist Martin Kinnear, I seriously reconsidered my artistic aims, and was drawn to the idea of painting history through specific people, places and events.
My work explores the close relationship between writing and art, using the profound inspiration of European history, and artistic influences both medieval and modern, to give shape to my vision. I use tools and techniques designed to rethink the genre of history painting and express an interpretation of the past in the language of contemporary visual art. My vision is to bring the past alive in the present using both traditional and innovative techniques in composition, use of colour and mark-making to create a compelling visual narrative.
