Elizabeth Barlow, a contemporary still-life painter represented by Andra Norris Gallery, grew up in Salt Lake City amid art and flower gardens and later shifted from urban life to the Monterey Peninsula. In her Flora Portraits series, she paints delicate flowe
When Elizabeth Barlow moved from San Francisco to Carmel-by-the-Sea in 2017. her work changed in a way she describes like an immersion—ocean mists. twisting cypresses. and year-round cottage gardens replacing the city’s glamour and energy. For Barlow, the studio didn’t just get a new view. It became a new daily practice: waking early. meditating. and then building paintings that take months to complete—works that treat flowers not as objects. but as presences.
Her Flora Portraits series began after she relocated to the Monterey Peninsula in 2016. when the natural landscape sharpened something she already carried. In Barlow’s telling, flowers hold meaning beyond decoration: symbols of life force, fragility, and re-emergence. “Seeing the inner spirit of the flowers that I paint (and encounter on my daily walks)” is connected. she says. to her meditation practice—silence as a way to notice what the fast. noisy world tends to blur.
The idea that flora can have character is not a detached concept for Barlow. She speaks about it like recognition, something she has learned by looking longer than normal life allows. She calls herself a slow painter by practice and intention. and says that patience opens her eyes to the “inner beings” of her subjects. When she takes time to look deeply at a flower while painting it. she describes being “awakened from the deep sleep of busy-ness” and seeing the wonder of the present moment—light. breeze. sky. all pressing into the room.
That commitment to slowness isn’t only aesthetic; it’s structural. Each painting takes from 3 to 8 weeks to complete, depending on canvas size. The painting time itself is only part of the work. She keeps a “behind the scenes” process running as long as a year: gathering flowers when they’re in season. photographing them in early morning light. testing composition. changing her mind. and beginning again. The layered technique—multiple glazed stages of oil paint—makes speed impossible. But she insists slowness is also a choice, something that steadies her in an increasingly busy, image-saturated culture.
The ethical challenge of her scale—enlarging delicate natural forms to confrontational size—lands the same way. By exaggerating the size of a flower, Barlow says it forces pause. It requires her and the viewer “to slow down and look more deeply.” Her paintings position flowers as messengers. beauty as an invitation: strength within fragility. hope. faith. grace. and transformation.
What turned these ideas into a defining body of work was also, in a blunt and personal sense, about survival. Barlow describes two changes in 2017 that altered her life and art. The first was the move from San Francisco to Carmel-by-the-Sea. In the city. she had been stimulated by the vibrancy of urban life; her earlier work reflected that “glamour and energy.” In the seaside village. she found herself surrounded by a different rhythm—ocean mists. twisting cypresses. and year-round flowers in cottage gardens.
The second change came through a commission tied to the 2017 Wine Country Fires. A collector and patron of the arts who had lost his home in those fires asked her to paint something specific: the fire destroyed everything on the property except the grapevines and a single rose bush. When spring arrived. Barlow says. that one bush began to bloom “gloriously.” The homeowner decided to build a new house on the same site and asked for a 6-foot painting of that rose bush for the new home. They titled it The Phoenix Rose—because the rose literally rose out of the ashes—meant to carry hope. resilience. and re-emergence.
Now, she devotes her time and energy to painting larger-than-life flowers and offering their message to the world. The beauty of a flower. she says. is an enticement that beckons people toward inner awakening—the kind of awakening that pulls them out of the “sleep of busy-ness” into the miracle of the present moment. the only moment there really is if people will stop and see.
That insistence on presence also shapes how Barlow lives outside the canvas. She grew up in Salt Lake City, Utah, in a house filled with art and surrounded by flower gardens. Her father. the late artist Philip Barlow. is central to her origin story—she took a detour in the performing arts before following his inspiration back to painting. She earned her BA at the University of Utah, later completing a Master’s Degree from the University of Virginia. She continued her arts education at UC Berkeley Extension, where she earned a Post-Baccalaureate Certificate with Distinction in Visual Arts.
Gardening, too, is part of the work’s everyday logic. Barlow says her mother was a talented gardener. and that as a child she took it for granted that home included the garden itself. Adult life mostly pulled her toward San Francisco’s city energy, not nature. But after moving to the Monterey Peninsula. she became a gardener in a cottage garden filled with roses—25 bushes—lavish in beauty and scent. Each morning. she opens the kitchen window shades and looks first at roses. then later walks to her studio. passing other cottage gardens in the village as if they are guiding her attention.
Her slow, layered practice now sits within a wider artistic life. She is represented by Andra Norris Gallery. Her work is held in collections including the Monterey Museum of Art, San Francisco Opera, and Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital Stanford.
When she talks about what has inspired her lately. the sources are as personal as her process: daily encounters with art and books. She says she just finished Pico Iyer’s Aflame. a book that recounts Iyer’s 35 years at the New Camaldoli monastery in Big Sur as he restores himself in silence. And she mentions her friend David Ligare, whose show features early “sand” paintings and drawings. Ligare made abstract drawings in sand on the beach below his house in Big Sur. photographed them. then recreated them in his studio as drawings and paintings—work that is both abstract and “astoundingly real. ” and made with reverence for each grain of sand.
In Barlow’s paintings, flowers don’t simply appear. They arrive like characters in a story that asks you to look longer than you intended—until speed stops feeling inevitable. until fragility doesn’t read as small. and until re-emergence doesn’t feel like a slogan. but a sight you can almost paint yourself into.
Elizabeth Barlow Flora Portraits still-life painting oil on linen Carmel-by-the-Sea Monterey Peninsula Andra Norris Gallery Philip Barlow UC Berkeley Extension meditation and art Wine Country Fires The Phoenix Rose Monterey Museum of Art San Francisco Opera Lucile Packard Children's Hospital Stanford David Ligare Pico Iyer Aflame