Seeing the Light Within

Sharon Ellis lives in a treehouse. At least it seems that way; her redwood cabin is set high enough above street level that its windows look above the treetops to the sun-dappled Silver Lake Reservoir. That view from the living room is a good thing, since Ellis clocks eight hours a day there, painting her radiant otherworldly canvases. Each painting requires about four months to complete. After two years, she finished the six highly colored pictures chronicling “Times of the Day” that go on view at Christopher Grimes Gallery in Santa Monica on Saturday.

With nervous graciousness, Ellis serves strong coffee in thrift-shop cups on leaf-shaped coasters. Six cats mill about the small but meticulous rooms. On a tilted plank of wood attached to the wall, she is putting the finishing touches on the last painting for the show: “Dusk.” Black oleander branches dotted with white flowers are silhouetted against roiling clouds in electric shades of fuchsia, lilac, marigold and cerulean blue. The other paintings--”Dawn,” “Morning,” “Midday,” “Afternoon” and “Night”--were sold as they were completed, but are being brought together for this show. Ellis explains, “I like working in series for the same reason I like choosing a subject for a particular painting. It helps direct my imagination.”

For the past decade, Ellis, 43, has been painting imagined images of nature, using brilliant color and symmetrical, patterned compositions. Critics see her 1994 paintings of “The Four Seasons” as the breakthrough work--trees losing leaves, flowers bursting into bloom, stars swirling above the sea, snow falling in crystalline patterns, all rendered in translucent layers of magenta, crimson, gold, emerald, chartreuse or turquoise. The Long Beach Museum of Art exhibited this series in 1996 and committed to a survey of her work in 2001. In the brochure for her show, director of exhibitions Martin Betz wrote, “Drawing from countless . . . influences, including the turbulent landscapes of Vincent van Gogh, Disney cartoons, photographs from outer space and computer-generated graphics, Ellis synthesizes or ‘processes’ all these sources to create a unique vision of nature and the beauty inherent in it.”

Watching the shifting light of passing time from her window inspired Ellis, but she decided to pursue the notion after seeing drawings by early 19th century German painter Philip Otto Runge, a contemporary of Caspar David Friedrich. “That era of art interests me. It gave me a chance to think more specifically about light in my paintings. I intentionally place the light source within the painting itself. So with the times of the day, the light emanates in different ways. In the night, it comes from individual stars. In the morning, it comes from the sun and, in the painting, from a halo of yellow stars with a white light in the center.”

By carefully applying layers of an oil-based paint called alkyd over a white base, Ellis achieves a luminous effect. “The reason I paint them the way I do--as opposed to a looser, more painterly style--is that it adds to the intensity, the impact of the painting. There is nothing vague about it. Runge said something like, ‘To the extent that your vision is mystical, the more attention you should pay to the order in the form.’ I actually want things to be clearer. One of my favorite artists is William Blake, who talked about his desire to make things clear because, to him, the ideal world was more real and solid than our world.”

Even as a child, Ellis had dedicated herself to drawing and painting, but her education at UC Irvine, where she got her bachelor’s degree in 1978, nearly put an end to her aspirations. “After I graduated from Irvine, I quit making art completely for three years. Being an art student in the ‘70s actually convinced me that I was not an artist because the vision presented to you as a student was very narrow. People were constantly speaking about ideas, not images or paintings. I wanted to learn how to make a good painting. Also, illusionism was so reviled in school, and I believed that illusionism is something good.”

She did, however, fall in love with her teacher, Chris Weir, now a sound editor, to whom she has been married now for 15 years. In the late ‘70s, they moved to Berkeley for five years, where she attended Mills College, getting her master of fine arts degree in 1984. It proved to be the opposite extreme. “Their attitude was that to read or talk too much about art would damage you somehow,” she says with a laugh.

A move to New York in 1984 launched the artist’s attraction to art of the 19th century. Having grown up in Norfolk, Va., and San Diego, Ellis had “never seen that many great paintings before.” The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Frick Collection offered a personal introduction to art history unavailable in her required slide lectures as an art student.

“More and more, I didn’t feel I was learning anything from the contemporary art around me,” she says. “I started looking to older art as a guide to learn how to make paintings. The 19th century had been the most inspiring because it seems very close to us, almost modern in a way. Yet the forms they used go back to Gothic times because of the Gothic revival movement and the Pre-Raphaelites. The way they used the art of the past is analogous to the way I use it. At Irvine, to talk about art of the past was a bad thing, as if you were completely irrelevant. But you can’t be a painter without looking to the past.”

The daughter of a naval officer and a homemaker, Ellis was raised as a Southern Baptist, then went through a rebellious period as an atheist. Today, she believes she might “fall into that category of people who think of art as a religion.” Her painting affinities are often compared to those of the Symbolists, the late-19th century artists who sought to express mystical, spiritual concerns as well as dream imagery through decorative interpretations of nature. “I feel like I understand Symbolism because, for them, if there is another world beyond the physical world, there is some question about what it is. In earlier 19th century Romanticism, it is definitely God. Symbolism doesn’t necessarily include a belief in God.”

She cites the influence of such Symbolist artists as Odilon Redon, Gustave Moreau, Ferdinand Hodler and Paul Gauguin, as well as 20th century American Moderns Marsden Hartley, Arthur Dove and Georgia O’Keeffe, who incorporated and transformed the Symbolist mandate. She also likes Charles Burchfield’s late landscapes for their eccentricity.

After three years in Manhattan, Ellis and Weir wanted to return to a rural environment in the West, so they opted for Washington state, living on Whidby Island in Puget Sound. After two years there, Ellis confesses, “At certain times, I hated nature. I got the monstrous quality of nature when it is not a pleasant, healing environment. Yet, I like the fact that nature is still frightening. I don’t like the idea of a completely controlled world.”

After they moved to Silver Lake in 1989, Ellis initially painted organic abstract patterns that bordered on the hallucinogenic; critics referred to them as “retro” and “psychedelic.” Although she had painted her own psychedelic posters in Day-Glo colors as a young girl, she did not enjoy the comparison. She shifted her emphasis to the natural world. “There is something about a landscape, as opposed to a purely nonobjective painting, that has an emotional component to it. I’ve always been intrigued by the space between Realism and complete nonobjectivity because, to me, that is where all the difficulty lies in making a painting. It’s a lot more dangerous.

“I exaggerate partly what I think is very strange in nature,” she adds. Looking again at her painting of dusk, the oleander branches appear threatening, the clouds portentous. “I am thinking of the painting as more of an inner vision, so it has to make sense on that level. Some things that make sense on the inner level are not to be seen in the physical world.”

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“TIMES OF THE DAY,” Christopher Grimes Gallery, 916 Colorado Ave., Santa Monica. Dates: Opens Saturday. Regular schedule: Tuesdays to Saturdays, 10 a.m.-5:30 p.m. Ends April 3. Phone: (310) 587-3373.