Images of Nature’s Landscape Reflect Complex Worlds Within

Sharon Ellis makes paintings that function as an intense polemic in favor of empirical, intuitive experience as expressed through a work of art. In the 10-year survey of Ellis’ work that opened Sunday at the Long Beach Museum of Art, her ecstatic, highly refined, chromatically brilliant visual essays on time, the seasons and the visual power of decorative pattern are on view. Obliqueness trumps didactic instruction, language is subsumed within inchoate modes of feeling.

If this sounds a lot like Symbolist painting, it’s worth remembering that an unruly Symbolist impulse has typically arisen in periods like our own, when art is dominated by the limiting, always conservative doctrines of academic formula. It happened in Europe late in the 19th century, when Impressionist painting had become rote and established. It characterized early Modernist art in New York, with painters as different from one another as Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley and Georgia O’Keeffe.

And in ways that have yet to be fully explored, most (if not all) progressive American artists working in otherwise socially conventional milieus around the country throughout the 20th century embraced Symbolist strategies. Ellis is an heir to the transcendentalist abstract painters of the Southwest, like Raymond Jonson; to the mystical musings of Mark Tobey and Morris Graves in the Pacific Northwest; and to such diverse painters as Gordon Onslow-Ford, Lee Mullican and--especially--Agnes Pelton in California. She brings a distinctly contemporary sensibility to the genre.

The Long Beach show features 28 works, chronologically installed by curator Martin Betz. The earliest group, which dates from 1991 to 1994, shows the development of her now-distinctive brand of what could be called Neo-Symbolist painting.

“Many Moons” (1991) is a jet-black canvas, 3 feet square, spotted with yellow-orange disks of various diameters. Each disk is surrounded by an electric-blue halo. The canvas squares a circle made from a tangled web of reddish-brown lines, punctuated at points by yellow starbursts within blue disks. Closer inspection reveals that the starbursts are flowers--morning glories in full bloom--while the tangled web is a coiling vine. Looking at the painting is like looking at the night sky through flowers that only blossom in intense daylight.

Ellis’ paintings tend to unfold slowly, their paradoxes revealed in many layers. The intense palette of “Many Moons” yields a visual snap and crackle, while the starkly patterned composition removes the imagery from the realm of natural observation.

Suddenly the view into the cosmos through a garden flips the other way, becoming almost microscopic in orientation. It’s as if you’re peering at a mass of nerve tissue or into the nucleus of a cell. In “Sunken Garden” (1993), an underwater shower of tiny bubbles doubles as a cascade of individual cells or ova, brimming with the possibility of new life.

This suggestive fusion of outward nature, patterned abstraction and the inner human body gets elaborated--and increasingly sophisticated--as Ellis’ work proceeds. Trails of puffy clouds can seem intestinal. Silhouetted branches become ganglia. A view through the underbrush is transformed into the envelope of a womb.

A suggestion of full, looming figures even emerges in the color-infused spaces between articulated forms in later paintings, such as “Midday” (1998) and “The Four Seasons” (1999). The show’s second body of work introduces temporal issues into the mix, with series of cyclical paintings based on times of the day and year. Finally, her most recent paintings evolve from nature poetry--Swinburne, Emily Bronte, Hart Crane--another form of worldly experience internalized.

One drawback of the show is the crowded installation. The exhibition demonstrates the ways Ellis has played with materials and formats to achieve her complex ends. But the intensity of these pictures demands concentration, which is best served by seeing them in isolation. Space in the Long Beach Museum galleries is tight.

Her paintings tend to be modest in size. The largest, at 4 by 5 feet, is the Wordsworth-inspired “A Vision of Spring in Winter” (2000), commissioned for an exhibition at the Getty Museum that year; but it’s a bit of an anomaly. Most of the pictures are 40 inches on a side or smaller.

The earliest are square in format, which creates focused visual stability. With the 1994 series “The Four Seasons,” the format shifts to horizontal, enhancing the expanse of landscape. Verticality enters the picture in 1996, as the orientation echoes that of a viewer standing before the painting, while the imagery within begins to emphasize the celestial. Subtly, you’re made to feel as if you’re raising your eyes skyward, engaging in a secular communion with the mysterious, ingenious entity that is a work of art.

Ellis achieves her dazzling chromatic effects through the use of alkyd glazes. Alkyd is a synthetic resin that dries quickly, so that color can be applied in thin layers. Transparent and translucent, it allows light to pass through and reflect off the canvas.

The bilateral symmetry of most compositions evokes that of a human or animal body. Often Ellis employs an overlay of silhouetted trees, vines or other plant material, which can seem like a map of the body’s central nervous system, or perhaps a high-tech brain scan. The silhouettes, usually painted black, create flat, lacy patterns that intensify through contrast the ambiguous space created by the light-reflective color glazes. The vivid effect is positively psychedelic.

Indeed, there’s barely a square inch in any of these paintings that hasn’t been labored over in some way. Sometimes it’s by depicting an object, elsewhere through a tonal slide from dark to light, at other places in a surge or deflation of pictorial rhythm. Everything is dependent on multiple relationships of form, space and hue. They virtually embody Baudelaire’s commitment to an art of “intimacy, spirituality, color [and] aspiration toward the infinite,” remade in a contemporary idiom.

And like a Baudelaire poem, these paintings speak of the sophisticated pleasures of urbanity, of nature created as cultural reflection. Ellis might be dreaming about the natural world in this gorgeous work, but it’s a reverie that unfolds within a delirious context that’s inescapably suburban. Who else would celebrate in paint the sheer loopy magnificence of a “Cathedral of Dandelions”?

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“Evocations: Sharon Ellis, 1991-2001,” Long Beach Museum of Art, 2300 E. Ocean Blvd., Long Beach, (562) 439-3587, through April 21. Closed Mondays.