The place I call home motivates me to paint. Things loved, collected and used, and the landscape not too far beyond my driveway all inspire me. Painting on vacation is useless for me, unless we are vacationing in a place where we used to live. I have to hear the voice of the place. After driving by the same old barn on 588 again and again, it eventually begins to tell me its tale, and I hear it in a Mississippi drawl specific to Jones County. It tells me about the cotton that once dominated here, and the way Ellisville grew into a city when the train came through, and when timber became king. The barn maintains an independent spirit like the people who built it, refusing to succomb to age or weather, as if to say, I know what's best for me and mine, and a neighbor in need is the same as kin. How could I not come back with my gear, and finally stop the car, get out and compose a painting? If I did not love the places and the objects I paint, there would be nothing to say about them. They all have stories to tell and special memories that I cannot keep to myself.

Elizabeth Ross Starr Patterson revived her childhood interest in making art in 2005, after visiting Mississippi for the first time. When she toured Laurel's Lauren Rogers Museum of Art, she made up her mind that she wanted to work there. Her husband discouraged her, telling her she wasn't qualified in any way to work for a museum and that they were unlikely to hire someone they had never heard of before. In her desire to make herself an asset to the museum, either by volunteering or possibly working there after their planned furture relocation, motivated her to take a summer job with Historic New England, working in a house museum on Boston's North Shore. At the time, she lived in Boxford, Massachusetts. The summer job turned into six years, and a grant-funded position in the collections facility, where she found herself working among talented artists and conservators. After raising a family and using her degree from Converse College teaching high school English for a number of years, she began studying art as an "empty nester" at Northern Essex Community College. With the encouragement of her professor, Linday McCullouch and visiting artist, Ed Smith, she was awarded the Mercedes Matter Scholarship to attend the New York Studio School. Afterwards she studied with landscape painter, Pat Lutz, in Newburyport, Massachusetts, further refining her skills in oil painting. Elizabeth relocated to Ellisville, Mississippi, in 2012. In 2014, she found employment with the Lauren Rogers Museum of Art, and began painting in her first ever studio on the weekends. In 2020, she left the museum to pursue a full time career in painting.