Elizabeth Horning was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts Degree in Painting from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1965. As an undergraduate, she received a Royal Bailey Farnum Scholarship and grants from both the Ford and Carnegie Foundations. Since graduation, she has never ceased to study art, and over the years she has attained superb technical proficiency in her craft.

Horning began her career in art as a teacher, setting up and implementing art programs in the elementary schools of Franklin, New Hampshire until 1973, when she moved to the American Southwest, where she lives and paints today. Throughout her career she has worked as an illustrator, commercial artist, art director of a commercial enterprise, designer, and creator of fine art.

Horning possesses a rare ability to flawlessly communicate the joy she receives from flowers and all other living things with paint on canvas and paper.

In speaking about her work, Horning says, “Although I have worked in a wide variety of media throughout my career, I keep coming back to oils. I think oil on canvas allows for more spontaneity than practically any other medium. It is my favorite medium for composing pictures and working out new ideas which, once resolved, I will reinterpret on paper. Much like watercolor, oil paint on paper tends to have a more transparent quality; it, like watercolor, can easily be destroyed by overworking. So, foremost in my mind when I am working on paper is the preservation of the light which is vital to the life of the painting and which must come from the paper itself.”