ESSEX — Artist Ellen Few Anderson abstracts her Westport environs in bands of color, which are on exhibit in Fields of Vision now through Dec. 21 at Whitcomb’s Arts, 1598 State Route 22, Essex.
The gallery is flanked with Anderson’s textured time portals of her acrylic oeuvre.
“It’s a big, nice space, and so I thought, ‘Oh this is a chance that I can sort of put some of my older paintings,’ especially the ones I want to sell. Some of the older ones I put lower prices on because I want to get rid of them, and it was partly, I’m running out of space at home to keep all these paintings,” she said.
For the past year and a half, the 78-year-old artist has engaged in writing to answer decades-long questions: Why do you do this? What does this mean? How did you come up with this way of doing it?
“So I’m constantly sort of trying to explain that to people,” she said.
“I have grandchildren, so I thought why not try to put into a book with lots of illustrations, so that’s what I’m doing. Then I also have a writing group I’ve been going to, which has been great fun because I just bring sections, you know, and we read our sections and we all talk about it. So it’s just been kind of encouraging me to keep going along with the writing. It’s very fun. I love writing.”
ELLEN FEW ANDERSON NOV. 7 GALLERY TALK
“Welcome to this wonderful gallery!
“This has been a fun exhibit to put together, in part because I’m in the middle of writing a book about my painting. I’ve been looking back at my life and thinking about elements that have influenced the way I paint.
“As I was growing up, my family moved from one intriguing place to another. Before I was 19, I had lived in five different countries. When I was 5, we moved to Tokyo, Japan. When I was 9, to Dusseldorf, Germany, and then from my age 11 to 17, we lived in Italy — Rome — for six wonderful years. When I was in college, I went home to Malaysia for the first two summers.
“My father was a cultural attaché in the American embassy, and my mother an art historian, so my arts education began early. I’ve also traveled extensively in such diverse areas as India, Nepal, China, Yugoslavia, France, etc.
“I’ve been enchanted with the light, the colors, the layers of atmosphere and history and recorded memories and ideas in numerous journals and sketchbooks since I was 5, and later, also thousands of photographs.
“At Duke University, I majored in painting and art history and confirmed that in my own painting. I was drawn to the infinite possibilities of abstraction.
“I taught painting and art history for 30 years, mostly at St. Mary’s College in Raleigh, North Carolina. I taught many students how to paint, including realistic representation. During those years, I also had two children, from birth to college, and rarely had time myself to paint.
“All my life, during summers, I’ve come home, at least briefly, to Westport, the home of my great-great-grandparents who looked at these same views in the 1800’s, and, more recently, my grandmother and mother, from whom I learned to love Westport, Lake Champlain and the Adirondacks.
“Not long ago, looking through a box of my mother’s very miscellaneous papers after she had died, I came across a child’s pale watercolor painting on a small piece of newsprint paper. I could immediately recognize the view of Lake Champlain from my grandmother’s house in Westport.
“I turned the paper over to see if by any chance my mother had written the artist’s name on the back. To my delight, it was signed in very large childish letters with a paintbrush and red paint with my name! Ellen Few but divided in three lines to fit on the paper:
“ELLE
“NFE
“and dated by an adult, Aug 12, 1952; 4 years old
“When McCutchen and I moved to Westport to live year round in 2006, I began painting this new series of abstract paintings, strongly influenced by this same view, which has dazzled me almost every summer of my life.
“Although abstract, my painting is very much based on what I see, especially color and color combinations. The abstraction involves simplifying the layers and eliminating recognizable details to leave a structure of broad bands of color.
“The actual process of painting involves quickly applied layers of thick paint with a palette knife or large paint-brush, leaving visible textured brushstrokes and sections of color that stretch from one side of the surface to the other, sometimes separated by edges of black non-color.
“When I started painting my current series of abstractions on long narrow vertical canvases, I was conscious of my interest indoors as beginnings and endings, and the views through partly open doors as glimpses into the future or past.
“Later, I noticed the obvious Japanese references: the long, narrow shape of Japanese scrolls and the suggestion of Japanese calligraphy, often evident in the black under layer.
“I’ve been inspired by several artists. Unfortunately, none of whom were my teachers. In Italy, I discovered Piero della Francesca, an early Renaissance mathematician and painter who died in 1492, well known for his use of perspective and timeless, calm figures in frescoes.
“Later influences were Matisse with his intense color and flattened form, and Mark Rothko and his color-field paintings. and then, in the 1970’s, Richard Diebenkorn in California and his Ocean Park series, which combines color field painting and lyrical abstraction. and very importantly, Edith London, who had escaped with her husband from Germany in 1933 and ended up working at Duke University as a slide librarian in the 1960’s.
“Edith London and Diebenkorn have been my two strongest influences.
“In 1969, in the final painting critique of my senior year at Duke, an intriguing older woman, not introduced to us, chose my painting out of about 30 to comment on very favorably and, specifically, implying a deep understanding of painting.
“I did not have a chance to speak to her and later learned that she was Edith London, the slide librarian for the art history department. I wondered about her very knowledgeable and perceptive remarks.
“Twenty years later, in 1992, I heard about and attended a retrospective of Edith London’s paintings and discovered that she was a superb painter of abstraction, living for the last 20 years nearby in Durham, North Carolina.
“Unfortunately, by this point, she was already 88 years old and did not attend the opening. I would have loved to meet her and talk with her about her painting and about my own painting.
“Preliminary sketches are an important part of my process. I walk a lot, in every weather and time of day and return to paint quick, small images or paint them looking out windows.
“I’ve sold most of these preliminary sketches but finally realized that I should save a few to help explain my process.”