Sharon Ellis
I feel that my work follows in the tradition of love for the natural world, obsession with the painted universes we create, and a reverence for the mystery of imagination itself. There will always be a place for a new image, another symbol for what it feels like to be immersed in the seasons and spectacles of the earth: alive to the beauty and also the danger in our universe.
— Sharon Ellis
Selected Works
New Works on Paper
September 24 - October 29, 2022
Kohn Gallery is delighted to present a collection of new works by California-based artist Sharon Ellis. Ellis’ visionary landscapes merge symmetrical composition with brilliant, glossy color hovering in the realm of the sublime. This new body of work examines summer in the desert, shifting from star filled nightscapes to science-influenced renderings of heat waves. This exhibition coincides with Ellis’ participation in the 2022 California Biennial at the Orange County Museum of Art. Her work is included in the collections of the San Francisco Museum of Art, Long Beach Museum of Art, Laguna Art Museum, Walker Art Center, Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art, and Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
Ellis’ lush visions of the natural world act as both a warning and an enticement, further emphasized by a conscious recording of the physical process with flowing lines and intense, saturated color. Up to sixty layers of lustrous, alkyd paint obscure all traces of the painter’s hand, ensuring a licked finish where the separation between the nonobjective and representational is never completely delineated. Paintings like Mojave Night construct an interplay between chaos and order, with the finely worked, serene grooves of a purple desert punctuated by a clutch of stars. By contrast, Summer Heat features a ferocious, undulating sky framed by copses of blackened trees.
Ellis’ Romantic abstractions owe as much to the physical process as to her artistic predecessors. Numbered among her influences are painters Charles Burchfield, Joseph Stella, Georgia O’Keeffe, Agnes Pelton, and Arthur Dove. These early American modernists were inheritors of the European traditions of Romantic landscape, Symbolism, and Art Nouveau, but were nevertheless strongly devoted to expanding the potential of abstraction in the pictorial realm. This radical ability to synthesize the conventions of naturalistic forms with inventive compositions is fundamental to Ellis’ work.
Art for Ellis is ultimately a spiritual practice, harkening back to 19th century aesthetic principles and craftsmanship. As she states: “I feel that my work follows in the tradition of love for the natural world, obsession with the painted universes we create, and a reverence for the mystery of imagination itself. There will always be a place for a new image, another symbol for what it feels like to be immersed in the seasons and spectacles of the earth: alive to the beauty and also the danger in our universe.”
Selected Press
About the Artist
Born 1955 in Great Lakes, Illinois
Lives and works in Yucca Valley