Artist Statement Biography Resume

Biography Early in my painting career I created work which was both abstract and sculptural and was composed of found and traditional materials. I was interested in playing with the tension between painting and sculpture and in producing an odd hybrid where an assortment of unlikely materials were ordered using choices that one would employ on a two-dimensional surface. Though not a new idea, this approach offered possibilities for finding interesting materials and fresh imagery. As my work began to extend from the wall and to inhabit the space of the room it continued to maintain its painterly quality. A piece completed for a La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art show was nodal for me, as the first to become more installation than painting. At a certain point I began to feel that it would be challenging to return to a two dimensional picture plane and to attempt to infuse the power and complexity of the earlier work into a more concentrated format. This provided me with many years of source material and direction. In the mid-nineties I did two years of graduate level work in theater design at UCSD and brought to my painting the notion of the "black box," a contained space (in this instance the blank canvas) which provides a fertile environment for animating ideas and imagery. Perhaps from this influence I entered into several years of a series of black paintings, which were characterized by strong contrast and the strength of the penetrating light and an exploration of the edge between abstraction and figuration. This was a particularly satisfying period of painting as the work kept me in a very primary realm. In the late nineties I became interested in transitory artworks, created around the world and produced as an integrated impulse in everyday life. I focused particularly on eastern Indian rice painting, often extraordinarily complex and beautiful, but meant to exist for only hours or days. I worked with a woman who taught me many of the traditional forms and began to include some of these images in a series of paintings entitled “Ephemera”. This provided me with a way to re-introduce more drawing into my painting, to begin to play with archetypal images and to regard my own work in a different light. Over the last four years I have been engaged in the problem of reducing my imagery, while keeping the painting compelling. It has been a period of synthesizing, where I have drawn from the energy and surface quality of very early work, combined with more recent explorations in marking. I have chosen the loop and other elements as primary forms which reappear in my work, and set them in relation to simplified grounds. The repetitive mark making is an important part of both process and content and contributes to an overall energy and tension in the work. My work can be seen privately or through Quint Contemporary Art in La Jolla, California. - Ellen Salk

images copyright Ellen Salk 2009