Love

Why are all the really powerful forces such as love, gravity and time, those that we cannot see? If all is energy moving in the dynamic dance of life at quantum level, can we as human beings simply be defined as concentrations of energy?

For Ellen Zaks, these mysteries are the starting point of her artistic explorations and unfold her desire to come closer to what reality might be.

Her innovative work in both painting and poetry seems to suggest a belief that thoughts can travel backwards and forwards through time and space and that our memories and expectations can take us away from the present, allowing our imagination to reach to the furthest stars. Indeed it is difficult for our minds to focus, however briefly, on the here-and-now. Our consciousness may give us the illusion of separation but on an atomic level, the many are the one because all boundaries disappear. When we perceive the world in this way, we can begin imagining ourselves moving through what can easily move through us.

In Ellen’s paintings the confinement to the geographical positioning of our so-called material bodies, so familiar in traditional figurative art, is exposed as an illusion. She commits herself to the task of painting “the center that is everywhere and the circumference that is nowhere”. There is a scientific belief that seems to provide validation to Ellen's creative path, that the first manifestation of the creation of our universe was movement and the prime duality was space and movement.

On a practical level Ellen’s paintings are informed by first-hand experience of dance both in classical ballet and more recently flamenco. On a recent visit to her studio I remarked on her listening to music when she paints – “It helps me see and feel within my own body the many subtle qualities of movement, such as weight, rhythm, line and timing”. I thought – what a miraculous leap we humans make when we are able to transfer these sensations onto a stretched piece of canvas and what a wonder then to communicate these qualities to others.

Ellen’s oeuvre suggests that the most powerful force in creation is love, “Love is the centripetal force.” Her work is centered round a belief that our direct experience of beauty and love can give us a positive healing charge. The act of painting is, for Ellen, a form of meditation, an activity that enriches and heightens our perception of the world. “I plan the work but then it takes on a life of its own, as I begin to connect with something greater than myself. It is always a heightened experience for me and one in which I feel a very loving power working through me.”

Being an artist at the start of the twenty-first century, Ellen is well aware of how male artists have traditionally concentrated on painting the female nude (often to the exclusion of the male). One could say that the male nude certainly needs re-instating in today’s world. Ellen paints the human form from a woman’s perspective and in doing so, endeavors to share the discoveries that she finds beautiful. Her paintings have often been described as sensual and erotic, but this is an unintentional outcome of such an intimate relationship with the nude form; it is unsurprising, as it comes from a deep reverence for the gift of life and a physical body, which Ellen believes must be celebrated. When she paints the female nude, Ellen is able to place herself, or an aspect of herself, within the painting.

But, what of the paintings themselves? How do they reveal themselves to us? Ellen presents us with a feast! Her work is alive with lavish, glowing colours, delicate blooms and vivid washes of amazing chromatic intensity. As our eye roams this fascinating painted surface we encounter thick lozenges of oil paint (sometimes applied straight from the tube). Ellen saturates her canvases with rich spectral frequencies of light that remind us of ancient stained glass. In these paintings, colour is miraculously transformed into an unspoken language that positively informs and affects us in psychological and physiognomic ways.

Although Ellen Zaks considers herself to be a figurative artist, (informed by Egyptian art, ancient rock painting, the poetic visions of William Blake and the overt physicality of Rodin’s sculptures) she invests her work with many abstract qualities. She endeavors to indicate a wider reality and include intimations of the quantum world, a world where images dissolve and shift with the stresses of powerful and invisible forces – temperature, magnetism, gravity and the electrical charges that we ourselves receive and emit – and all this is happening within time and space.

Ellen is a dancer who paints, so it is natural for her to begin with a figure in motion. This form (which can be the same figure repeated in motion or a group of individuals) serves to provide the narrative. Her figures have archetypal qualities; therefore they include aspects of the viewer standing before the painting. But where these paintings differ substantially from conventional figurative painting is in the deliberate blurring of the relationship between their constituent parts – figure and ground become one to some degree because the characters inhabiting Ellen’s paintings are perceived moving through a reality that acknowledges particle physics.

The complexity of human interactions is dazzling on so many levels. It seems that true reality encompasses the imagination and vice versa and can in some ways be glimpsed through the creativity of the artist. Ellen conducts a balancing act between logic, intention and chance, allowing the electro-synaptic activity of thoughts and emotions to act upon the whole. To develop her unique way of painting she has had to learn the immeasurable value of knowing it is alright to fail in order to make progress. Because of the complex interplay of unknown forces, unique to the time of the execution of each painting, individual works cannot ever be repeated. What has influenced and guided Ellen has been a true marriage of head and heart. By trusting her emotions to fire up her creativity and believing that she has something important to say in paint (for which there is no language in words) she has succeeded wonderfully.

Stefan Dowsing.