Now this must be the sweetest place from here to heaven's end; the field is white and flowering lace, the birches leap and bend, the hills beneath the roving sun, from green to purple pass, and little trifling breezes run their fingers through the grass. - Dorothy Parker
In Ellen DeLoach’s powerful new body of work, she continues to explore and expand on the themes triumph (over adversity, personal, social, family and health related) through Faith and the will of the individual so eloquently stated in her first mature body of work, The Book of Ruth. Many contemporary writers such as Jane Hamilton, winner of the 1989 Penn/Hemingway award have taken this story from the Old Testament and created an exquisite book that confronted real-life issues of alienation and violence from which the author created a stunning testament to the human capacity for mercy, compassion and love.
The book of Ruth was written sometime after 1010 B.C. The story opens in Moab, a pagan country east of Judah and the Dead Sea. Naomi and her husband Elimelek fled there during a famine. After Elimelek and Naomi's two sons died, she decided to return to Israel.
Faithfulness is one of the key themes of this book. We see Ruth's faithfulness to Naomi, Boaz's faithfulness to Ruth, and everyone's faithfulness to God. God, in return, rewards them with great blessings.
A high sense of honor also dominates this book. Ruth was a hardworking, morally chaste woman. Boaz treated her with respect while fulfilling his lawful responsibility. A sense of safekeeping is emphasized in the book of Ruth. Ruth took care of Naomi, Naomi took care of Ruth, and then Boaz took care of both women. Finally, redemption is an underlying theme in the book of Ruth. As Boaz, the "kinsman redeemer,” saves Ruth and Naomi from a hopeless situation.
Ellen DeLoach found in the parable of the book of Ruth, a direct metaphor for her own life and faith that helped her triumph over great adversity. The connection she felt with the subject of her work and the act of painting itself as a spiritual pursuit had a deep and authentic connection with an audience when she first showed these paintings at Bill Lowe Gallery; partly because the themes in this body of work are universal and partly because they are painted with a fierce passion and emotion. It is this aspect of her work, Ellen DeLoach’s process of painting, in both the figure paintings and the new body of Landscapes (with many themes concomitant to the figure paintings) that I will focus on the rest of this essay.
In the brilliant new body of Landscapes (such as A Murder of Crows K.M.B. and Regeneration 1 & 2) on DeLoach’s long drive back and fourth from her studio to home, she would pass Kennesaw Mountain, the scene of many great battles of the Civil War. I remember talking with Ellen after she produced the first Book of Ruth series, she wanted to step away from the personal narrative in those paintings partly because they were so emotionally charged and draining. She turned her brush, charcoal, wax and knives to landscape and as much as she tried in these paintings to “lighten up”, the same themes of loss, anguish and redemption is at the heart of the Landscape series.
In discussing DeLoach’s figure and landscape paintings, an easy entry into understanding their profound beauty, (for those who are given pause at their intense, visceral, almost violent nature) can be found in the precedents of the figure painting of Frank Auerbach, who’s deeply moving figures look as though they were painted from the “inside out” and Anselm Kiefier’s monumental mixed media landscapes based on the Old Testament and the Holocaust of WWII. In reading the attendant volumes of writing on both of these Painting Masters by writers far more qualified and articulate than myself, and looking at their works, you will find many parallels in DeLoach’s that will give you a greater understanding and access into this sacred and at times fierce beauty.
Not to change the tone of this essay from the sacred to the profane; I used to watch DeLoach paint and say, “she paints like Rabbits multiply”, although a much cruder term was used in private. She is small in physical stature but paints with a speed, directness and a physicality of some one of much greater muscle. In this speed and direct physicality, she becomes connected and “one” with the process and equivalency to many spiritual practices such as Dovaning in Judaism, dancing of Whirling Dervishes for Sufism, the use of Automatic Writing and the subconscious of the first generation of Abstract Expressionists.
In her magnificent works on paper (some of my favorite works of Ellen’s) both figurative and landscape, the scale, speed and the direct attack becomes fully realized. The variation of marks, the immediacy of approach, the freedom, the recklessness, and the control, at their optimum, rival the best of any works on paper I have seen in recent memory.
For all of Ellen’s practice of Faith, it is in her transformation through the act of painting that becomes palpable and shared. Her paintings are hard fought victories. Her painting does not come easy for her or become REAL until she has built up layer upon layer, sometimes using wax, sometimes using collage, even the dirt from the landscapes of which she paints, subtracting, scrapping, making intuitive adjustments of smaller color shifts, accents, then going back and making more conscious adjustments. Until the painting feels TRUE she creates a history, a record of loss, triumph and redemption through her act of painting that actualizes the underlying themes in all of her work, whether it works on paper, figure paintings or the newer landscapes. Through their fierce, intimate, brave marriage of subject and object, of narrative and process, it is in that very real tension that the truth and the beauty found in her work becomes profoundly moving and beautiful.
I believe you want from painting what you want in your life, freedom, courage and integrity. If your moral compass in your painting and in your life points towards these goals, I believe you will always be stronger and you will find beauty in the truth of that pursuit.
Ellen DeLoach needs no compass, she knows no other way.
Michael David
October 2013