blog #2

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Guitars, quinces and fans

New year, new work…

Hello and welcome to my first newsletter of 2026! I hope you are in good form after the festivities. Now it’s time to get down to the business of shaking up our old habits and regimes which we may have pushed to their limits lately. As you may remember, I visited Monet’s garden in Giverny…

Open Studio – original paintings and giclée prints at Quinta Pintados, Chilrão

I’m pleased to announce the arrival of new prints of a selection of my paintings, and after a long absence, an open studio date: Sunday 7th DecemberQuinta Pintados, Chilrão, Monchiquefrom 11am – 4pm Refreshments will be available. A selection of my original acrylic, watercolour and oil paintings will also be on display. All the images…

Rooftops over Peso

… on a misty autumn day My latest painting, just completed, is from a sketch of two years ago (at the end of September ). It’s a familiar view on my regular journeys into Monchique. I always find the view across these hills awe-inspiring. Finally, I got the wrappings off a new canvas (and I…

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Guitars, quinces and fans

For this painting I decided to continue with the Cubist theme, inasmuch as using the repeated motifs of the guitars and fans. The quinces weren’t repeated, they were real! Well most of them were.
The painting began by laying the guitar onto an octagonal table top, and looking at how I’d like to arrange the painting. An internal frame was inserted, and the guitars repeated. The fans were placed, and the quinces drawn in. I started painting began in Veridian green and pink… which changed to red, then yellow and green, dark blue. I paint a lot of layers when using acrylic, to produce a flat even surface. Sometimes it takes quite a while to work out the colours so the layers will most likely consist of a variety of colours until I feel the painting ‘works’. This took a long time. I used different types of shading, linea ‘hatching’, vertical and diagonal, brushy shading and bubble dots.
It became a complex image, as I worked to resolve the balance between the guitars. I also used stencils for the floral pattern which overflows from the yellow central fan into the larger guitar.
Despite all this, the octagonal angles are still visible in parts and repeated lower down on the body of the central guitar.





About Me

Hello, it’s Liz here, of lizallenart.com. I’m pleased to announce that I’ve just made this new website to show my paintings to the world at large.

Since 2005, I’ve been living near Monchique in Portugal’s Algarve region, but am originally from the U.K. Since living in Portugal, I’ve found plenty of inspiration for painting, particularly in the landscape. I hope you’ll have a look around my new website and enjoy what you see.

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Still life with Guitars, Quinces and Fans
acrylic on canvas
54 x 54cm
available