Note Type
ExhibitedNote
PDX CONTEMPORARY ART, Portland ORNote
Using some of the thinnest panels of Baltic birch available, Ellen George has developed a body of work that both floats on the wall and carves out space for slow looking. Each piece is graphically inviting from a distance - soft, organic forms in pale yellow, punchy red, unnameable blue, and barely altered raw wood. From across the room, they can at times appear delicate, with even the most chromatically intense pieces looking obscured by a soft haze; but more often than not, their simple shapes and reduced palettes offer more definition than uncertainty. Up close, however, the emphasis shifts and the atmosphere within the work is revealed. Embellished with paint and silver-point, each is a miniature world that highlights Ellen George’s sensitivity and confidence in the pursuit of understated abstraction - restrained arcs, fine lines, modest washes and the occasional brushstroke, all in the eye of a brewing storm that is rarely bigger than the artist’s own hand. At this intimate distance, it is apparent that she is as concerned with chance as much as intention, chaos as much as order. Nothing is certain and nothing is entirely unleashed. Even the defiant warping of her panels is tempered and graceful, as if to remind us that even as the universe exerts a will of its own, the artist has drawn on a well of experience to guide her materials and give her forms stability.
…Silverpoint lines echo the overall panel shape in an attempt to define space within. Or perhaps it’s the other way around - it is just as easy to imagine the barely legible interior contours willing the larger shape into being and opening up a space beyond.
- David Schell
2025. The Semi-Finalist.Note
There is a cleat on the back of painting for mounting to wall.
