Marie Van Elder

Van Elder was born and raised in Brussels, Belgium. She graduated from UCLouvain, Belgium and moved to California in 1988 where she received her MFA in Painting in 2003 from California College of the Arts, San Francisco (and studied with Mary Snowden, Linda Geary, David Huffman, Christopher Brown, Larry Sultan, etc…).

Van Elder’s work has been included in exhibitions in California with the SFMOMA Artists Gallery, Kala Art Institute, Bedford Art Gallery, Art Market SF, SVMA, Richmond Art Center, Dominican University, San Jose ICA, Marin Moca, Berkeley Arts Center, George Lawson Gallery, Fourth Wall Gallery, The Great Highway, Lyndon Design Gallery, Gualala Arts Center, Marin General Hospital  (ArtSourceInc), in LA with Erica Tanov, Startup Fair, in New York, with the Westbeth Gallery, Blue Mountain Gallery, Manhattan College and in her native country Belgium, with Bozar Museum, Wiels (Brussels), and Gery Art Gallery, (Namur).

     She was an affiliate resident at the Headlands Center for the Arts in Sausalito (and a Tournesol Award finalist in 2007). Her work has been featured in New American Paintings and Studio Visit magazine. 

She has participated in residencies at The Vermont Studio Center, BigCi (Australia), Palazzio Renaldi (Italy), and will be at Arquetopia (Mexico) this fall.

     She currently lives and works between Brussels and Northern California.

With a studio located on the northern California coast, Van Elder has been connecting her art practice to her physical environment and sense of place. Observation of the natural world (through hiking, paddling, backpacking, roadtripping) has inspired a new series of work and the motifs of stumps, sea rocks, and other formations and the relentless forces of nature, in the larger underlying conversation about climate change.

     As always, her work touches upon notions of solitude, resilience, time, beauty, mortality, impermanence, responsibility, and the exuberance of painting.