Liz Demaree

I have been photographing and painting houses for over 10 years. When driving in a new area or town, I’ll look at a particular house, and say to myself “What would it be like to live here?” When I was a child, our family moved many times. Sometimes we lived in small houses; once we lived in a large restored farmhouse in the Pennsylvania countryside. So I guess I have a natural curiosity about moving to a totally new place. Sometimes a certain town will particularly strike me, and that happened the first time I drove through Port Murray, NJ. Not a particularly picaresque place, it nonetheless occupied my thoughts and time for many years. Although I’ve since worked in other places, I often revisit it, and the stories I wrote about it. To me, houses seem a natural subject matter, much as the figure does for many artists. Nor am I necessarily interested in beautiful or artistically interesting houses. For instance, I did a series of paintings of abandoned houses; and it struck me that even the most modest of them had been, at one point, brand new and probably an exciting place to live or setup from an apartment. But whatever the house, or where ever it is located, they all have a story for me.