ART CITIES: Los Angeles-Sharon Ellis
Sharon Ellis’s luminous interpretations of the natural world function simultaneously as cautionary tales and alluring invitations. Her compositions, marked by fluid lines and vivid, saturated hues, bear witness to a meticulous and meditative creative process. Through the deliberate application of up to sixty layers of radiant alkyd paint, Ellis achieves a lustrous, nearly enamel-like surface that conceals any evidence of the artist’s hand. This polished, finish blurs the boundary between abstraction and representation, suspending the viewer in a space where the real and the imagined converge without ever fully resolving.
“Recent Paintings” marks a new chapter in Sharon Ellis’s enduring exploration of the natural world—an exhibition of intimate, imaginative landscapes that reveal her deep reverence for nature’s mystery and majesty. In this latest body of work, developed over five years, Ellis conjures visual poems from indescribable environmental phenomena, capturing the earthly sublime through saturated color, vein-like linework, and an exquisite sense of symmetry. These lush, transcendent visions—arguably among the most refined in her four-decade career—transform elements of the landscape into characters in a silent, dreamlike theater. Working from what she calls a “completely irrational series of decisions,” Ellis uses simple cues—such as the time of day or the changing of seasons—as portals into altered states of perception. What begins as a quiet observation becomes, under her hand, an optical spell. A field of glimmering stars drapes across undulating mountains rendered like pleated fabric; a scarlet harvest moon peers through the gestural lattice of towering trees. In works such as “Fairy Garden”—the inaugural painting of this series—nature is not merely represented, but animated with a spirit of communion between the human and nonhuman worlds, a bond that resists verbal articulation. Describing “Fairy Garden”, or indeed any of Ellis’s paintings, inevitably strains the limits of language. One might expect otherwise: the forms are precise, the colors vibrant and assured, the compositions immaculate. Her ultra-soft brushes leave behind no trace—no stroke, no hesitation. There is no ambiguity, no indecision. And yet, words fail to mirror the quiet astonishment these works provoke—the sense of surrender they both reflect and invite. For all their clarity and control, the paintings possess an emotional resonance that escapes definition, hovering somewhere between vision and reverie. That reverie is rooted not only in Ellis’s imaginative insight but in the physical rigor of her process. Each work is built up through as many as sixty layers of alkyd paint, creating a dense, luminous surface that conceals the artist’s hand entirely. The result is a finish so pristine it seems untouched by time, evoking a stillness that feels sacred. Ellis’s painterly language draws deeply from a lineage of early American modernists—Joseph Stella, Georgia O’Keeffe, Agnes Pelton, Charles Burchfield—who themselves extended the Romantic, Symbolist, and Art Nouveau traditions into new abstract realms. Like her predecessors, Ellis is a visionary synthesizer, capable of merging naturalistic form with inventive, emotionally charged composition. This synthesis—between the seen and the sensed, the structured and the spontaneous—is what makes Ellis’s work both timeless and urgently alive.