Liz McCann: Wide-Eyed Wonder
Artists Palette|No 167
This clever artist never recalled her childhood in black and white … so vivid colour has played a vital role in expressing faded memories from her younger days.
Trevor Lang
Liz McCann: Wide-Eyed Wonder

Liz McCann (formerly Liz Chatburn) received a Bachelor Degree of Visual Arts from Uni-SA Underdale in 1998. In 1994, she graduated with a Diploma in Applied and Visual Arts from North Adelaide School of Arts.

Liz’s work has slowly evolved over the last five years and she is currently exploring, in a rather analytical way, the highly charged impact that sibling relationships had during her early and pre-adolescent years.

It was a time when a life of innocence and naivety prevailed. With wide-eyed wonder she embraced the world around her. Profoundly strong emotional family connections with her two younger sisters and brother meant she and they were never far apart.

Both her parents, Paolo and Marianna Giannotta, were Italians from Putignano Bari in Italy; and Elizabeth (named after her grandmother Elizabetta) was born in Kyneton (a rural town in Victoria).

At 15 months old, Elizabeth, with her mother, father and new baby sister Angelina, moved to Queensland. They initially lived in the Glass House Mountains region near Caboolture where her other sister Mary-Angela and brother Vito Nicola were born. They lived in an isolated farmhouse growing pineapples and bananas. After four years, and with four children aged under five, the family moved to Dohles Rocks near the Pine River on Queensland’s iconic Sunshine Coast – where her parents managed and worked a 96 acre pineapple, banana and watermelon plantation.

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