How does an artist reckon with the fact that a sketch artist working with charcoal, and a digital artist working on a tablet can both be said to draw? That modern acrylics and their plastic mediums are also called painters like old tempera artists who would use egg yolks? How could we ever say one is better than the other? Liz Compos paints in the uneasy territory between what is human and what we have built around ourselves.
Her work begins with a question that feels increasingly difficult to avoid: what happens when the systems, objects, and technologies we create begin to compete with the natural world, and with us?
For Compos, that tension is not abstract. It appears directly in the surface of the work. Structurally precise charcoal drawings meet thick, sculptural applications of oil paint. Organic forms push against hard edges. Areas of flesh-like texture interrupt flat, synthetic color. The paintings can feel constructed and disrupted at the same time, as though the image is trying to hold together while something artificial keeps pressing its way in.
“I respond to the struggle between mankind and the manufactured object,” Compos explains. “In this day and age, we are no more important than our increasingly complex inventions.”
It is a provocative idea, but the paintings don’t lecture the viewer. There is an aestheticism, and an appreciation of art in all its forms. But beyond the recognition of a landscape or a figure, geometry fractures the space. Color becomes too clean, too plastic, too obviously manufactured. What felt natural begins to feel engineered.
That disruption is absolutely central to her work. Compos is deeply interested in the visual language of contemporary culture and the speed at which it changes. Architecture, technology, fashion, street art, and media all filter into her paintings, not necessarily as direct references, but as atmosphere. The result often carries the visual pressure of an urban environment, where the organic and manufactured no longer exist separately.
Her method reinforces that collision. Paint is not simply applied to describe an image. At times it becomes almost sculptural, accumulating into physical masses that suggest skin or anatomy. Compos wants the viewer to recognize parts of what they are seeing while also feeling slightly displaced by them. Familiar imagery establishes a point of connection, while synthetic shapes and altered spatial relationships complicate it. The painting becomes less about depicting a specific place than about creating an environment where those contradictions can exist together. And we think she certainly succeeds in that.
Compos also works in murals, bringing the same visual language into public space on a much larger scale. The shift in size changes the relationship between the work and the viewer. Instead of standing before a painting, people move alongside it. The work becomes part of the architecture and the daily rhythm of the place around it.
Her practice also includes jade carving, a medium that introduces a very different kind of resistance. Where paint can be layered, scraped, and rebuilt, stone demands another pace. Compos earned her BFA in Drawing and Painting from Montana State University before later completing an MBA at the University of Colorado Boulder with a focus on Entrepreneurship and High Growth Ventures. The combination may seem unusual, but it reflects the broader path of her career. She has spent years moving between studio practice, community development, curation, and arts leadership.
Today, she serves as Executive Director of the NoBo Art District in Boulder, where her work extends far beyond her own studio. After previously serving on the organization’s board, she now helps support artists and creative initiatives throughout the community while continuing her own practice.
Her installations place us directly inside the conflict, confronting a world that is increasingly designed, mediated, and manufactured while reminding us that underneath it all, the human body remains stubbornly physical.
lizcomposart@gmail.com
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www.lizcomposart.com
