Sharon Ellis is a romanticist, which may be why her portraits of the world are luminescent, set to poems and named for the seasons.

        In conjunction with the Contemporary Arts Center's ecological art show, Evocations: Sharon Ellis, 1991-2001 appears in the front galleries.

        The brilliantly colored intimations of landscapes are expansive and visionary. Painted in translucent layers, they are saturated with color and depth of shade.

        “I am interested in the traditions of romanticism,” she says. “But have no interest in painting traditional landscapes. These paintings come out of a reverie of natural forms.”

        Ms. Ellis paints on an intimate scale — she can painstakingly produce only three canvases a year but with broad strokes and taking on epic subject matter. Her sweeping scenes of oceans and solar systems hold delicate close-ups of blossoms, twigs and leaves.

        “I see my work as spiritual,” she says. “But not religious.”

        The highly patterned backgrounds are achieved through a new representation of marbleized paper and cloud formations placed on a grid and repeated. Plant and tree forms are drawn from photographs or the actual plants and forms in the foreground are repeated in a folded-paper ink-blot manner, creating a mesmerizing symmetry.

        “Symmetry is a way of putting a person in a painting,” Ms. Ellis says. “The repeated shapes make people think of body parts — the symmetry of the body. It draws them into the picture.”

        Through her expert use of layering the light is refracted back from the white canvas moving through the paint layers and creating a glow. It's a modernized version of Renaissance illumination, and it is every bit as captivating and moving.

— Marilyn Bauer        

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