Editor’s note: Airstream will host a fine art invitational exhibit of landscape art, May 31-June 5, at its headquarters in Jackson Center. This is one a series of stories that will profile the artists whose work will be shown.

SIDNEY — It’s not surprising that when officials at Airstream selected artists to exhibit work in its inaugural fine art invitiational show, they included Elizabeth Jose.

The Taos, New Mexico, resident has put the iconic trailers into her paintings for years.

“I love Airstreams,” she said by phone recently. She and her boyfriend restored and now travel in a 1966 24-foot Tradewind.

“Airstreams are so shiny. So you’re not painting the Airstream. You’re painting what’s reflected in the surface,” Jose said. “They almost become invisible in some paintings. You see the reflection and then you see the trailer.”

The artist has lived in “a bunch of countries,” she said, traveled to all seven continents and lacks three states of seeing all of the U.S.

Airstream Life Editor and Publisher Rich Luhr, who has featured Jose’s art on the magazine’s cover, likes that the artist features the reds and oranges of her home territory, Monument Valley and the Southwest, in her work.

“She really does a nice job of capturing the beauty of the Southwest,” Luhr said. “I try to find images that evoke an emotion in viewers. I like Elizabeth’s work because you see the image — it makes you feel like you want to be there.”

Jose, originally from Hornchurch, England, and her then husband felt they wanted to be there when, in a different Airstream, they reached New Mexico during a cross-country trip.

“We were here two days and we were looking at real estate,” Jose laughed. Also a singer and voice coach, Jose had put painting on hold for a music career. But the New Mexican landscape was too beautiful to ignore.

“I started painting again. It was kind of a revelation, like part of me had been asleep and it woke up. I’ve been painting like a lunatic ever since,” she said. In addition to the originals which she sells on her website, www.elizabethjose.com, Jose creates an Airstream calendar each year, which includes photos of 12 of her works that feature the silvery trailers.

In her other work, she doesn’t limit herself to landscapes, but paints figures, nudes and portraits, too. As a result, she has become someone who works very quickly.

“I work a lot from a model. You have a model for three hours. You have to do as much as you can in three hours. So what I’ve done in my three hours is more and more,” she said. She admits to calling herself a fast painter.

“I joke that I’m fast and loose — but that’s the paint, right?” she laughed.

Jose works on one painting at a time.

“I’d rather have three paintings and one winner and then paint over two than work slowly on one for a week,” she said. “So the paintings have a freshness and energy.” There’s no down time between paintings, either. Jose keeps a mental list of some hundred ideas “in the back of my head like a filing cabinet. Then I’ll go through the reference photographs and sometimes what I thought I was going to paint doesn’t excite me. I have to get that excitement. I can’t just turn it on.”

She paints in the studio, using natural light, for about three hours a day. Mostly she works in oils, but she also does sketches in charcoal.

“When I was training hard to be a singer and training other singers, I did a lot of research about the creative process,” Jose said. “I learned to get out of your own way and being in the moment, being 100 percent present. That’s when the good stuff happens, the intuition, the ideas, the creativity.

“Minds are like puppies. They run all over the place. It takes a certain amount of discipline to corral the puppies. You have to watch your mind for the thoughts that come along that are the antithesis of creativity, (thoughts like) making judgments from the ego, thinking about if it’s any good,” she added.

Jose is unsure about which work she’ll exhibit in the Airstream show.

“The paintings I’ve done in the last year have been quiet paintings. I want something with more razzle-dazzle,” she said. This artist is always trying to “push the envelope” with her work. Not long ago, she copied some paintings by John Singer Sargent.

“That was interesting, to try to paint like somebody else,” she said.

It’s a Sargent painting she’d choose if she could own any piece of art. “Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose” hangs in the Tate Gallery in London.

“I go and visit that painting every time I go to London,” Jose said. “I’ve done that for decades now. He’s kind of a god in my worship system. At one time, he was so discouraged by some art reviews that he almost gave it up to be a musician. I always loved the paintings and thought we were kind of kindred spirits. It’s a big painting. It’s just fantastic.”

When she’s not painting, singing or teaching painters and singers, Jose likes to travel and to go out dancing to live bands. She has no children of her own, but enjoys the two boys who are her partner’s sons. When she was asked about pets, “A cat has me,” she laughed. “I’m a disappointment to her. She lets me know I could do better.”