Wanda Ellerbeck sees more than meets the eye in abstract art.
She has been an artist all of her life.
“I don’t think I decided to be an artist,” Ellerbeck said. “I think art found me, at an early age.”
Holding a Masters of Fine Art and years of experience teaching art, Ellerbeck is now focusing on painting abstract art.
“It’s more like an archeological dig where through the process of painting I’m uncovering a lot of emotional spaces inside myself but also letting the influence of the environment that I live in come through,” Ellerbeck said. “So for me it’s more about the sense and concern of the place. And I find it easier to express that through abstraction. And besides, it’s great fun.”
Ellerbeck and fellow Canmore artist Chrissy Nickerson held an art show in June at Elevation Gallery in Canmore and then at Mortar and Brick gallery in Lethbridge.
“After that I started to sell abstract paintings. So I think the market and the sense of art and what art can be has very much changed in Canmore,” she said. “And that is a result of influence from people moving in who have lived other places and people who are exposed to different kinds of art forms. And we have contemporary art right next door, at the Banff Centre. So I think all of those things have created a kind of new or different sense of what art can be here. And that for me is uplifting. It’s like, ‘yes’, that’s really good.”
Her focus has never been just to sell the art, she said.
“I would keep painting even if I didn’t sell the art here, and find a place where I could, because of course you have to make some money in order to keep going,” Ellerbeck said. “You have to buy paint and brushes, pay your rent and all of that. Selling art is important. But I can’t start a painting with the idea that it’s going to be for sale, or else I’m sunk. It has to come from my process, my own self, and what I’m dealing with inside myself.”
The rest of it is just the struggle and finding a place where people can see it, she said.
“The viewer is very important to my process,” Ellerbeck said. “And I think about the viewer when I’m painting. With abstraction the viewer will bring their own interpretations and it will remind people of different things and that is the beauty of it. It’s not telling people how to view and how to think and this is art. This is the work I’m doing now. What inside yourself as a viewer will you find? And I find that interaction really interesting.”
She is working on an abstract piece that she says has gone through many permutations
“But basically it was an attempt,” Ellerbeck said. “Right now I’m struggling with the formal aspects of it how these colours work together and balance so it doesn’t look like a mess. I get really excited when colours start to bounce around each other. So some, like green, are in the background and the white comes forward. There’s a reference to ice and snow and the Earth. You see colours like this in the river. I don’t go into this piece and say this is about the river. I go into it solving the problem that’s in front of me. So every brush stroke you put on asks a question, should it be on there or shouldn’t it be. And is it the right colour?”
There are no rules, she said.
“Everything here has to come from inside myself,” Ellerbeck said. “It’s a different way of painting than looking at a still life or a figure and painting that. Those kinds of artists also deal with the same formal questions. It’s just the expression is different. And I find this more engaging and stimulating than regular landscape painting, for me.”
But she said she loves regular landscape paintings.
“There are some great landscape painters in this valley. Just for me, this is what’s working,” Ellerbeck said. “Your painting has to talk back to you. You’re in a conversation with your painting. But that’s the challenge of abstraction, to let it speak to you as opposed to force yourself in what your busy monkey brain says on top of it. So it’s not an intellectual, rational process at all. It’s intuitive and quite irrational.”
Check out her Facebook page to find out more.
