Writing by Gia Miller
Photography by Justin Negard
In the mid-2000s, Liz Green began making large silk paintings in her very compact Manhattan studio apartment. She painted four at a time, with each panel measuring between 36” and 42” square before they were stretched, and because she worked as a fashion buyer during the day and could only paint at night, each set of panels took approximately three weeks to complete.
Green needed a flat horizontal surface to work on these paintings, which were gifts for her friends’ weddings, so she and her husband lived around her work.
“You couldn’t even walk into our little excuse of a kitchen because I would have four stretched silks laying out,” Green remembers. “Some would be on tables; some would be on the floor; I even had to buy a stand for one because there wasn’t enough room. It was such an obstacle course just to get water!”

Liz Green stands proudly in front of her silk painting, featuring a vibrant pink peony in full bloom.
She would paint four panels at a time so they could eventually be stitched together to form the canopy of a chuppah, which is part of a traditional Jewish wedding ceremony. Since the individual panels formed one large image, the colors needed to match perfectly. If she mixed dye for a petal, she needed to finish that part of the petal on the other panels at the same time.
Painting silk is similar to painting with watercolors, but even more delicate. Setting the dye requires a specific process, which cannot be done until the entire silk is painted. And while the silk will eventually feel dry to the touch, if any moisture or drop of water lands on it before it sets, it is ruined. So, every step, every move, in that studio apartment was done carefully. Just one wrong turn, one accident, could ruin weeks of work. It was nerve-wracking.
“With silk paintings, until you set the dye, even a sneeze could ruin the entire thing,” Green explains. “And drying is a whole process.”
Green dried each silk panel individually in her small kitchen. She began by rolling the silk up in unprinted newspaper, making sure the silk never touched itself, and carefully hanging it over a special cylindrical steamer that featured a small pool of water at the bottom. It was a delicate balance; any contact with the water touched during the steaming process would ruin the silk.
“Each panel would steam on my stovetop for three to five hours,” Green explains. “If you do it correctly, once the dye is set, it’s a really vibrant color, but you have to be really, really careful. So, every time I took a silk out of the steamer, I would panic. After working on it for so many hours, the silk could be destroyed in an instant. Once all four silks were set, I would bring them to the dry cleaners so they could clean them properly and do the final setting on the dye before the panels could be whip stitched together. That way, after the wedding, the couple could frame the four pieces separately and hang them in their home.”
“There was so much physical stuff that I needed in this tiny apartment,” she continues. “But I never cooked, so I stored paint supplies and sweaters in my oven. My husband was amazing. He never complained; he just supported me, and he’s still like that to this day. I could never do any of this if it were not for his support. But still, that was such a different world, a different time.”
The strawberry girl
For as long as she can remember, Green has loved painting flowers. But her very first painting, at just two or three years old, was Strawberry Girl.
“Strawberry Girl is famous in our house,” says Green with a laugh. “There was a girl’s face in the center, and I drew strawberries all around her. My parents were impressed that I had such control over the brush.”
By six years old, she knew she wanted to be an artist.
“If anyone ever asked me what I wanted to be, it was that or a veterinarian,” Green remembers. “But one day, a boy in my class told me I couldn’t eat meat if I was a veterinarian. And at the time, that made sense to me, and I thought, ‘I guess I can’t be a veterinarian then.’ So, I decided I would just focus on being an artist.”

Lily Green’s pink calla lily demonstrates her use of light and shadows to create depth.
Throughout her school years, Green, who grew up in Livingston, NJ, won contests and was mentored by art teachers and administrators. Except for Strawberry Girl or a specific assignment, Green says roses have always been her primary focus.
“It’s funny,” she says, “because I don’t personally love roses myself. But when I first started painting, everything was a rose. Roses have so many petals, and I was fascinated by how they unfurl. There are so many opportunities for light and dark inside the petals, just like the work itself. The architecture of that flower is incredible.”
By high school, the art studio was her “favorite place, without a doubt.” There were no other students as serious about art, so she began competing with herself. Green was her own harshest critic, always listening to her negative internal dialogue that constantly pushed her to work harder and do better.
Green enrolled in AP Art her senior year, a course that requires students to choose a focus and create a body of work around it. Green chose roses and windows—two topics that allowed her to play with lights and shadows. She was talented, but the class was stressful. Green compared her art to her teacher’s examples, which ranged from a three to a five on the AP Art exam; she didn’t believe her own work could match up. She was wrong.
“I got a five,” she says. “I have a twin sister who was always very competitive, so I still joke with her about it. My sister, who is now a doctor, took so many AP courses, but I only took one. So, I will say, ‘My lowest grade in an A.P. course was a five. My average is a five. What’s yours?”
A future in fashion
Green entered Cornell University as a fine art major, but she switched to a textiles & apparel design major the second semester of her sophomore year. She found her art professors to be overly critical in a manner that wasn’t helpful, and she began to doubt her dream of becoming an artist. The change was necessary.
Green, who says she always enjoyed designing clothing, thrived in her new major. She was fascinated by courses like textile engineering, where she learned the scientific reasons why each chemical reacts with different fabrics. But her favorite class taught fabric techniques. That’s where she learned silk painting.
“That major gave me a creative outlet that would actually give me a career,” she explains. “And the people who were critiquing my silk paintings were not fine art teachers. They were textile teachers who loved my work and provided me with a different perspective. I loved it. I felt free to be myself without worrying, without having this negative voice behind me. Even the friends I made in that school were so encouraging and made me feel good about myself.”
Upon graduation, Green launched her plan: learn how to run a business so she could start her own one day. The plan began at ESCADA, where she worked as an assistant buyer, focusing on their outlet stores. After two years, she decided she didn’t want to work in ready-to-wear. Accessories, she realized, was a better fit.
Green landed a job at Italian handbag and shoe designer Furla, where she worked with retail stores and franchisees. She analyzed and crunched numbers, learning a bit of Italian along the way because every spreadsheet was sent to her in Italian. Green found the culture and the job fascinating.
“It was so interesting to see what colors and types of bags were selling really well,” she recalls. “I always loved psychology, and that was probably the closest I will ever get. We would use this data to figure out what the consumer was looking for. Why didn’t they like this, or why are they going that way? It was really cool; I loved it.”
But after three years, she moved again, this time to a small California-based company called Isabella Fiore, whose business department was located in New York. She loved everything about it: her colleagues, the brand’s creativity and culture, traveling to California every few months, etc.
“The president of Isabella Fiore was in New York, and she became an incredible mentor,” Green recalls. “We were a small group in New York, and it was like a family.”
Green even represented them on QVC for several years and did “a little bit of designing toward the end.” She stayed there for 7.5 years until she had her first child.
Throughout her career in fashion, Green continued to paint. Prior to moving in with her husband, whom she met in college, Green lived with a roommate while her then-boyfriend attended medical school at Montefiore Einstein. With her dad’s help and several IKEA bookshelves, Green and her roommate transformed their studio apartment into a two-bedroom. It was cozy, and there were no doors, but Green painted.
“It was easy because I was just doing small canvases,” she explains. “But I needed that. I felt like my brain would explode if I didn’t have that outlet. Eventually, I moved in with my husband, and we lived in two tiny studio apartments together. That’s when my friends and cousins started getting married and when I began painting the chuppahs.”
The turning point
When Green became a mother in 2011, she chose to raise her children full time. She painted as often as she could, but that was about once a week. In March2020, before the lockdown, Green rushed out to buy as many canvases and paints as she could. Her son was in third grade, and her daughter was in preschool, and while she didn’t know how long the shutdown would last, she knew it was coming.
At the same time, Green and her husband had to make a very difficult decision. He is a gastroenterologist and works at a hospital, so they were forced to discuss safety. Should he stay at a hotel to protect his family or come home? Green wanted her husband home, and even though his sanitizing routine was overly cautious, it was terrifying. So many things were unknown.
“We survived COVID-19 and lockdown, and we thrived as best as we could, but knowing I had my art helped me make the most of this time,” Green remembers. “I painted at night, after the kids went to sleep, and it gave me balance; it was a healthy distraction.”
“COVID-19 really made things so much clearer for me,” she continues. “One thing it taught me was that tomorrow is definitely not guaranteed. So, one day, I was standing in my kitchen, and I told myself, ‘When this is over, when the kids are back in school, I am doing this for real.’ I made a commitment to myself that day. This would finally be the time for me to fulfill my dream.”

A striking white poppy painted against a bold black background.
Even before the world reopened, Green began posting her artwork on Instagram. At the time, she was focused on paper art (we’ll get to that later), and a distant friend reached out, becoming Green’s very first customer. Green sold three or four pieces during the first year of the pandemic.
Becoming a “real” artist
In 2021, with her kids partially back in school, Green was ready to launch her new career, and as she had anticipated years earlier, her business background proved beneficial. Green knew how to run a business, purchase supplies, manage a budget and be efficient with her time. She also understood the psychology of pricing and how to communicate with buyers, but the one thing she didn’t know how to do was market herself on Instagram.
“It helps that my best friend is a millennial,” Green chuckles. “So, she started teaching me how to use Instagram, and she’s still teaching me. At the time, she was also trying to build her own business, so I helped her with that.”
Green also needed to relearn how to paint, in a sense. She hadn’t painted with acrylics since she lived in Manhattan, and once she became comfortable with those, she decided to give oil paints a try.
“It had been about 20 years since I painted with oil, and it was definitely a struggle at first,” she explains. “I was so used to acrylic, where I could get these really sharp lines, and oil was just a completely different beast. It took me several paintings to start feeling comfortable with it, and now I actually prefer it over acrylic, hands down.”
One of her first commissioned pieces was for her twin sister, who had recently purchased a home and requested “lots of flowers.” Green wanted to paint flowers that were “a little edgier.”
“My version of edgier is a black-and-white painting where it’s only about the light and the dark and there’s no shading,” she explains. “It was a great experience because I learned what it was like to have a client, and she gave me a reason to stretch my artistic muscles and experiment.”
To build her portfolio, Green began painting for her parents and friends, which helped her perfect her approach to commissions. And although her commissions continued to grow, it took until the beginning of 2023 for Green to actually feel like she was a legitimate artist.
“I was going to Ace Hardware a lot because I was building frames for about seven pieces at once,” she explains. “And once, when I went back in to get more paint, the same person rang me up at the cash register.
When she asked me what I was doing with all of these materials, that was the moment when I said it for the first time. I said, ‘I’m an artist, and I’m building frames.’ She responded, ‘Oh, okay.’ And that was it. But I felt like someone was going to come up next to me and shout, ‘Imposter! You’re not an artist!’ Yet at the same time, I felt so proud of myself.
Calling myself an artist was the greatest feeling in the world. It was my dream realized. I was doing it. I was there. I was committing myself to it, and people were paying me.”

A rose painting showcasing Liz Green’s skill in depth and color.
Petals and paper
Today, Green’s main focus is painting large flowers, mostly roses. She hasn’t painted on silk in four or five years—the last ones she made were for her brother’s wedding. Today, her focus is solely on the canvas, and she alternates between painting with oils and acrylics. She says it depends on a variety of factors, including her mood, the size of the piece, and the petals. It can take her up to six hours to paint one petal and about one month to complete a piece.
“Right now, I’m using cotton for my canvas,” she says. “I know it’s not very fancy, but I actually love a canvas that has teeth to it, which a lot of people don’t; I just love the texture of a cotton canvas. I like how the paintbrush feels; it’s some weird tactile thing, like a sensory thing. And I like being able to see the canvas behind it. I don’t know why; that’s just something I love.”
She says she hates drawing, so she does a very rough sketch and eagerly begins painting. She only works on one petal at a time, painting multiple colors on each one.
“I mix colors on my palette as well as on my canvas,” Green explains. “And that’s why I love oil paints, because they stay wet so I can mix different colors on my palette; with acrylics, I have to work a lot faster to create that breadth of color. For example, in a white flower, there’s never a time where it’s just white. There are more reds, blues and greens than there are whites. That’s the magic of painting.”
Green says that in real life, she doesn’t love roses, but painting them is a different story.
“To me, flowers have a quiet, hidden power,” Green describes. “It’s not in your face; it’s quiet. The way the light hits a flower creates this drama, and I love how it plays with the petals. Flowers are so delicate, and they can break so easily in your hand. But they’re also so underestimated, just like so many people are underestimated. I enjoy bringing out their hidden inner power.”
When she’s not painting flowers, Green creates paper art, which she began creating in middle school. It begins with origami, and then she secures the folded papers on a canvas to create a specific or an abstract design. Green loves the medium and creating large-scale, three-dimensional pieces of art, something she cannot do with paints alone.
“I jokingly call it my active recovery from flowers,” says Green. “It uses another part of my brain and refills my battery so I could go back to painting. My flowers take so much time, and my eyes sometimes cross from working on a petal for six hours. Plus, it’s something I can do when the kids are around. I paint during the day when the kids are at school because I need 100% focus. Then I work on my paper art at night.”
Green also creates silhouettes and dot art as “active recovery” work, but her main commissions come from her flowers and paper art. About a year ago, Northern Westchester Hospital hired Green to create two works of art for the Ken Hamilton Caregivers Center: one painting and one paper art.
“When the hospital commissioned me, we decided we wanted a flower that represented strength and resilience for the caregivers, so I painted a dahlia. The other one was a large, three-dimensional paper art piece that was made with copies of thank you notes from caregivers over the past 17 years. They said things like, ‘Thank you for getting me through the hardest period of my life.’ So, I made a piece with different sizes, but you could read it, and then I printed a second layer of it and cut out butterflies. Butterflies symbolize renewal and rebirth. It was such an honor for me to be asked to do this. The caregivers center is such an incredible place that I feel like every hospital should have.”
Most commissions, however, are personal; they’re from an individual who wants a piece of her art in their home. Once they’ve connected, the process typically begins with the client identifying paintings they like, then Green asks them about their space, what flowers (or concepts if it’s paper art) are meaningful to them, and the colors they like.
As the client becomes more comfortable and realizes their artwork can be different from what they see on her website, they begin to open up and make suggestions. Some clients can imagine the idea and sign off quickly, while others need a drawing and paint swatches. If they live nearby, Green might even go to their home to measure the space and make recommendations. This process can take anywhere from one week to one month.
“My biggest goal during this time is to make them feel comfortable taking a risk with something they haven’t seen,” Green explains. “They’ve seen my art, so they know it will be similar to the rest of my
work, but I want them to feel comfortable and know they can have something different, something special that’s just for them. Because that’s what art should be. It is such a personal thing. Nothing could be more personal than something that’s hanging in your home. So, I try to encourage them to realize this painting should be for them.”

Liz Green smiles brightly in her studio, framed by her vibrant and beautiful paintings.
About 90 percent of her work is commission, which she loves. Clients, she says, bring her new ideas and fresh perspectives that get her “creative juices flowing,” making it a welcome and enjoyable challenge.
It really does take a village
Over the past several years, Green has also immersed herself in the art world, volunteering to do small tasks like hanging booth signs at The Armonk Outdoor Art Show. In 2022, for their 60th anniversary, she called artists to ask if they would like to make and donate a piece to the library. When the job was done, she wanted to do more. She asked the managing director if there was anything else she could do.
“She told me there was somebody retiring from a position that she thought I would be great for me,” Green remembers. “And I said, ‘Awesome!’ I didn’t know anything about it, but I said, ‘I’ll do it.”
Green became the artist liaison, which means she’s the point of contact for all artists, sharing information about timing, answering questions, etc.
Last year, she applied to the show as an artist; she was accepted.
“It was a big deal for me,” she says. “I’d been going to it as a guest. I always called it a walking, living, breathing museum, and I would walk away inspired. There were all these incredible people I got to speak with who are making this art, and it was just unbelievable.”
“I also showed my work at the Rittenhouse Square Fine Art Show in June and again at the Armonk Outdoor Art Show this October,” she continues. “It’s such a feeling of accomplishment to be accepted into these shows because the level of work is really extraordinary. And the other side that I never, ever anticipated is the friendships I made. Being in the show means you are now automatically part of this amazing community of artists, and a lot of them travel and do all these shows throughout the country. They know each other, and it makes such a big world feel smaller.”
None of this, she says, would be possible without her parent’s support, as well as her friends from college.
“There are seven of us,” she says. “It’s because of them that I feel it’s okay if I fail, because I know they will always have my back and support me.”
But it’s her husband who truly stands out. He will sit in her booth at an art show so she can take a break, drive to Philadelphia with her in her dad’s 20-year-old non-air-conditioned van (it’s big enough to hold her art) and cheer her on.
“I don’t think a week goes by that I don’t thank him for letting me do this— letting me realize this dream,” she says. “I could never have done it without him. Sometimes, I’ll just look at him and say, ‘Thank you. I got to paint today.’”
This article was published in the January/February 2025 edition of Connect to Northern Westchester.