Earth Energies

Commentary

Earth energies. The energy of land, sea and sky, the energy that underlies everything in our natural world. These are the things that capture Ellen’s imagination, that inspire her work in paint and sculpture. Her work reveals wild nature and the energetic underpinnings of its varied forms, the mountains and prairies that surround her current home in Montana, the big skies overhead and their ever changing moods, the diversity of wildlife that lives and thrives in an often hostile environment, and to the unseen but palpable energy that underlies all.

Her work is imbued with dynamism and movement, at times vigorous and brisk, at times ethereal and serene, where energy is always in flux, where one thing is becoming another, what nature is when you’re not looking.

Ellen is the first to admit that there is nothing formulaic in her work, instead, there is a continual searching for an authentic exchange between her inner reality (what she refers to as a maelstrom of past and present) and what she perceives in her contemplation of the constantly changing and moving environment.

In Ellen’s words, “An environment that mirrors in its slow, but often tumultuous movement, in its death and renewal, in its slumber and in its awakening, the living earth and a reflection of our deepest self”.

Her painting seeks to reveal a reality beyond what the eyes see, another realm of ever changing light, pattern and color, where one form shifts into another, where it either comes into being or disappears altogether.

Ellen uses texture and color—bold, dramatic and intense—to distill and clarify her expression. Her painting has an affinity to that of William Turner, Vincent van Gogh, the Group of Seven, and William Blake; yet it is far more abstract, lending itself to a more expansive yet personal interpretation by contemporary audiences, allowing the viewer to explore their own reflection in the various images of unbound nature.

Impending storms, crashing seas, cosmic skies, elusive wildlife, glimpsed as if in a mirror, there is a rawness and honesty in Ellen’s work, a fearlessness that catches one off guard, and, perhaps more importantly, there is a deep regard for nature and the earth, its unfathomable mystery, expressed as a radical form of love through her art.