"American Beauty" is an exquisite colored pencil drawing by contemporary photorealist artist Elizabeth Patterson, CPSA (Colored Pencil Society of America). "American Beauty" won the CPSA San Diego CA District Chapter's 2005 Award of Excellence.

This is a limited edition giclee print (image size 5.5" x 10.5").
#34 of 250 numbered copies signed by the artist.
Matted & framed by the artist to an overall size of 16" x 21" with the artist's studio label on the back.

This work is distinct from her current works--"rainscape" (scenes through wet windshields), but carries the same themes of water, reflection, and refraction, and may be considered a precursor to her "rainscape" series which began in 2006.

From a 2010 exhibition catalog:

Elizabeth Patterson['s] colored pencil drawings ... are at once meticulously hyperrealistic and complex abstractions. Though she had always been drawn to water in her work, the subject of the windshield allowed for the exploration of multiple realities in her images.

Extraordinary for their technical finesse, and utterly beautiful, Patterson's drawings are renowned for transforming the mundane simplicity of commuting in the rain into brilliant displays of the combined effects of water and light. "All of a sudden I started looking at the patterns on the windshield and at the very diffused background out the window. It blew me away. You have this shifting, changing canvas, and then the wipers go across and change it all. I was beside myself with this imagery," she says. Patterson completed her first "rainscape" in 2006, and for the fourteen years since, she has continued to create new versions of the intertwined worlds of the real and the unreal. With each individual raindrop that she renders by hand, her drawings are the preservation of the briefest moment in time, and how that single frozen instant can embody the most marvelous complexities and the most pure simplicities in one.