Ellen Koment American

Ellen Koment is an artist and teacher who attended The Cooper Union Art School and has an MFA in painting from UC Berkeley. She has been painting and exhibiting in...

As the year draws to a close, we invite you to celebrate the spirit of creativity and community at our annual holiday group show. This exhibition features a diverse array...

Having grown up in Coney Island, I always knew that life could be fun. And then came painting, the great adventure of my life. Through painting with oil paint and...

Step into a world of creativity that knows no boundaries, a world where imagination runs wild. Introducing 'Colors Gone Wild,' a captivating group holidays show that pushes the boundaries of...

I have painted all my life, with the figure as a resource, with the landscape as a resource, and simply with a love of color and form. Twenty years ago...

Ten or so years ago, I began pouring on paper. Pouring on paper doesn’t give much time for reflection, it has to be a process by which you trust yourself. The process allows you to work with multiple layers which combine to tell your story. But there is little ability to turn back, so you have to be absolutely present to the process. The wax is mutable, fluid and responsive. The wax sings your song and resists control, although control is entirely possible. It bends to your ways and leads you down new paths. And then, I have tried to bring some of the spontaneity of the pours onto panels. Where there is more room to negotiate, where you can more readily make changes.

In New Mexico, the landscape is always an inspiration, the vastness of it, and the amazing light and skies. All of which of course affected the paintings that I began to do. All of it was always something that I could bring to my painting. At first as actual landscapes, and then as an abstraction and understanding of the effect of light on all that I see, and on the work that I do. Encaustic allows a fluidity and containment of light.

But most importantly, to me, what I got to write in my afterward to Encaustic Art in the 21c, by Ashley Rooney: In part I wrote:

“We look for images from within and even more frequently look at the real world and translate what we see through our own vision. We take inspiration from the visual world, from the landscape, from other artists, from all the experiences of our lives. Somehow it is filtered through us to become our imagery. We go out to seek it, to photograph or draw from the land, from models, from architecture, and what we each take from it is something different. We go to see great art. We read wonderful books or hear moving music, and we never really know if what we see or what we hear is the same as others experience. It is filtered through who we are. There is no objectivity in perception or in our responses to the world.”

And so the paintings emerge.