Verde Forest — Heritage Trilogy 1 of 3

Forest is the first painting in Heritage Trilogy — a series of three works made about distance, roots, and the Brazil that does not leave, no matter how many countries, how many years, how many oceans stand between.
Deep, saturated green fills the centre of the canvas — grounded, present, unapologetic. It is the most anchored of the three. Below it, the arc of modelling paste sweeps across in bands of blue, yellow and green: the ocean crossed, the sun shared, the roots held. In this final painting, the green dominates. The roots win.
I was born in Rio de Janeiro. I have lived in four countries since. And in all of them, there has been something in me that belongs to the earth of Brazil — to its colour, its density, its wild and generous nature. That belonging does not require proximity. It simply is.
The modelling paste surface develops natural fissures as it cures — evidence of the material’s physical depth and the layered process of making. Each fissure is part of the work’s surface history.
Signed on the verso. Fitted with D-ring hardware and picture wire — ready to hang.
Available individually (AUD $220) or as a complete trilogy — Ocean, Sun, Forest — for AUD $580. Contact the artist for set inquiries.

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“I spent years searching for hidden treasures. I didn’t know I was the treasure all along.”

Born in Rio de Janeiro — a city of impossible colour, salt air and uncontainable energy — Liz Souza spent 15 years crossing continents before she ever picked up a brush.
She lived in the rural United States, where vast landscapes taught her stillness. She drove through the Abu Dhabi desert for two years, moved by its ancient silence and vastness — a landscape so breathtaking it brought her to tears more than once. She walked the museums of Europe, absorbed New York’s relentless creative pulse, and raised three children across four countries — carrying faith as her only constant.
She came to painting not through art school, but through a lifelong visual hunger — years of museums, landscapes and a deep sensitivity to form that finally found its language on canvas.
Liz works with acrylic, sculptural texture and golden leaf — building thick, tactile surfaces that hold what words cannot. Her work carries the weight of lived experience: the heat of a Rio summer, the silence of a desert highway, the ache of years away from home, the quiet miracle of beginning again.
Every canvas is an excavation. Every texture, a layer of a life fully lived.
Based in Sydney, Australia.