ARTISTS STATEMENT:

My interest has always been about repetitions, patterns and their inconsistencies, in complex arrangements. I notice the ethnic garment of a person walking in front of me, the stripes of buildings overlapping in the view from my studio, the horizontal bands of color as I drive through the landscape, the intricately embroidered textile at the street fair, and the syncopated rhythm of rectangles lit up in a residential high-rise at night. I take these observations from my lived experience, and through the language of abstraction, line, color and shape, I refer to the world out there.

BIO:

Barbara Ellmann, painter, has had two works recently collected by the City of New York. The Cambria Heights Public Library in Queens has an expanse of 55 encaustic painted panels, ALL THE THINGS YOU ARE, which was commissioned as a part of the Percent for Art Program administered by New York City’s Department of Cultural Affairs. An elevated subway platform on the J Z line in Brooklyn, is now a permanent home to seven of her abstract glass windscreens, THE VIEW FROM HERE.

Her paintings have been exhibited in galleries and museums around the country including the Bellevue Art Museum, the Montclair Art Museum and the Parrish Art Museum. Ms. Ellmann’s work appears in several books including Along the Way, MTA Arts for Transit by Sandra Bloodworth (The Monacelli Press), The Art of Encaustic Painting: Contemporary Expression in the Ancient Medium of Pigmented Wax (Watson-Guptill), Waxing Poetic Encaustic Art in America by Gail Stavistky (Rutgers University).

Her work is in numerous corporate and private collections including Peter Norton, Peter J. Sharp Foundation, Leonard Nimoy and the United State Embassy, Kampala, Uganda.