Sharon Ellis

Modest Ecstasy

She says, “But in contentment I still feel

The need of some imperishable bliss.”

Death is the mother of beauty; hence from her,

Alone, shall come fulfillment to our dreams

And our desires.

—From SundayMorning by Wallace Stevens

Throughout the history of art making in the Western world, there has always been a war. It is not a real war, of course, in which people are slain, but it is more than a quarrel and definitely a conflict between the raggedy world and the orderly battalions of eternity, solemnity, and utopia. These latter are artists who use form to envision the world made smooth. Then, there are the ragtag legions of death and beauty that elaborate upon the world as it exists—who would ornament that same world in order to arrest and intensify its actual fleeting benisons.

The imaginative battalions of eternity and solemnity believe in heaven. They don’t call it that these days, but they invariably evoke a “world elsewhere” populated and administered by an “elect.” (Thus their solemnity in the face of their election.) They disagree about the nature and constituency of this world elsewhere and about the mechanics of its becoming, but they all agree that it is coming, that it will be elsewhere, and that it will divide and refine the world in which we live. At some revolutionary moment, they believe, the future will be divided from the past; the selected self will be divided from the unselected other. Other distinctions are presumed to prefigure this ultimate division: the body divided from the mind, the senses from the soul, the realm of wild nature from the domain of human culture.

Sharon Ellis, Lunarium, 1996. Alkyd on canvas, 26 × 22 in. Photo: Scott Lindgren. Courtesy of the artist.

In Sharon Ellis’s paintings, these indivisible attributes are all enhanced by art, meticulously intensified and rendered ornamental. The aspirants of Heaven oppose artists like Sharon Ellis who are aspirants of Eden. The inference of this elaboration is what we see in her paintings, is what we might see in the world if we were not time’s prisoners, hurtling toward our fate, thus the meticulous pace of their creation. The paintings imagine all the magic we are missing in the fleeting magic that we do experience. Thus, the quick-frozen symmetries of Ellis’s paintings imply no eternal balance, but rather the rare, musical cadence of nature and culture—the instantaneous harmonic symmetry toward which nature aspires and by which culture is defined. By granting nature’s aspiration to symmetry and fulfilling the cultural expectation of symmetry that informs our perception of its lack, Ellis creates images from which negation, defect, disjunction, and default have been so exquisitely purged that the putative line between nature and culture, body and mind, self and other is invariably blurred.

In a very real sense, there is no nature in these paintings, nor any culture—no self, nor any other—no mind, nor any body, only the handsomely wrought instant of their authoritative confluence. Like her singular California predecessor Vija Celmins, Ellis presents us with landscape images in which the fractal universe we see—and the abstract language of our seeing—and the procedural methodologies through which we portray what we see—are so totally compromised as to be indistinguishable from one another. In the work of both artists, the pictorial is always on its way to abstraction; abstraction is always striving toward a condition of pictoriality; the artist’s hand is disappearing as the artist’s presence is subliminally suffusing itself through the atmosphere of the image—as our own restless, de-centered perception of the image is suffused as well.

Amidst this meticulous suffusion, Ellis’s paintings are never lost to us, but they are not easily found, because—to put it simply—their appeal is not personal. The paintings address us as human creatures, as citizens of our own distinct moment, but not as individuals, so even though we are there in the paintings, as is the artist, we are not ourselves. We sense, in the work’s exotic glamour, an ominous familiarity, like the sound of one’s own voice vaguely perceived amid the harmonies of a symphonic chorale, and we recognize that, for all their oddity, there is something profoundly right about the paintings, in their time and in their own place. They arrive in the present without peers but with a host of improbable ancestors in the realm of painting, at the culmination of their own history—one in which the extravagant intricacies of Jackson Pollock are traced back to the floral accouterments of Caravaggio, aligned in genealogy with the hallucinatory specificity of Caspar David Friedrich, Martin Johnson Heade, and Philipp Otto Runge, with the articulate complexities of Bridget Riley, with the stillness of Seurat.

Even granting the singularity of this family tree, however, it is easy enough to argue that the singularity of Ellis’s paintings in this seemingly past-less moment derives less from the eccentricity of their genealogy than from the fact that they have any genealogy at all. This, however, is not quite the case. The distinction is really in the genealogy itself and in the permissions it grants. The bulk of contemporary art does declare its own tradition—a tradition of modernist reduction, Freudian abjection, and Protestant renunciation. We read its virtues and its historical precedents in the language of what the work lacks and what it chooses not to do. As a consequence, the sheer appropriateness of Ellis’s paintings in Southern California at the dawn of the twenty-first century speaks directly to the problematic of Protestant postmodernism in temperate latitudes and cosmopolitan cultures where neither industrial modernism, Freudian psychology, nor Puritan rigor have ever expressed themselves with much cultural resonance.

Works in a post-something idiom speak with no apparent echo while Ellis’s paintings, for all their apparent eccentricity, resonate in a most unnerving way, simply because they express, in a positive, accumulative vernacular, a cultural inheritance that persists and continues to be shared by fellow inhabitants of the culture in which she practices. In fact, if one tries to imagine the kind of art that might have been produced in Southern California without the imported overlay of industrial modernism and Protestant rectitude—the kind of art that might have flourished had California’s own, odd comingling of Mediterranean generosity and Victorian romanticism been allowed to flourish unimpeded, that art would look a lot like the work of Sharon Ellis. In a world to which nature has been imported along with culture, in which the mind needn’t labor to keep the body alive, and the self resides comfortably in the temperate atmosphere that surrounds it.

In this climate and culture, Sharon Ellis’s paintings seem not just appropriate but virtually inevitable, and the artist’s serene confidence in this inevitability, I think, is best expressed in the cool modesty of the actual objects. This modesty is occluded in reproduction, of course, where the grandeur of Ellis’s subject matter subliminally enlarges our imagination of the paintings’ actual sizes, but when we are present with the actual, physical work, the effect is distinctly different. The paintings, as objects, are neither grand nor sublime. Somehow, their modest scale gentrifies the grandeur of their subject matter. We imagine Jane Austen passionately imagining the universe, and we are forced to acknowledge that, at this moment, Sharon Ellis may be making the most positive, least needy paintings in the world.

They give everything and ask for nothing. Their scale betrays no demand for an August setting, no aspiration to public oratory or civic circumstance, no inference of the artist’s heroic persona, or any urgent necessity to persuade. The paintings are clearly made, like the best jazz, for people who love and understand them, and, like the best jazz, they are redolent with the joy of fugitive occasions and secret enthusiasms. Thus, for all the time and skill with which they are invested, Ellis’s remain, happily, housebound paintings—as intimate as they are impersonal—as irrevocably secular as they are elusively tribal in their appeal. Like the landscape paintings of Fairfield Porter or Alex Katz, they assume a level of knowledgeability and refinement to which the public will never aspire, nor ever think to. Yet, like the paintings of Porter and Katz, they remain available to us, simply because they reject nothing. By embracing abstraction and representation, composition and pattern, temporality and narrative, death and beauty, Ellis’s paintings hold out the possibility of being recognized as objects that exceed our grasp without demeaning our longing—objects toward which our understanding might aspire, that we may love and respect even as we await the good, solemn, eternal reasons for doing so.