Spirituality of transformation is achieved through the physical act of painting – the carnality that can be found in the freedom, violence, and sexuality of the brush stroke. Ellen DeLoach’s images emerge from the series of a million nuanced hues, strokes, and adjustments. There are no mistakes in painting, merely marks leading to the next mark. A person’s life is not measured by their mistakes, but how they learn from them and carry on. DeLoach understands and owns this essential quality about life through the metaphor found in the materiality and the process of painting.

DeLoach’s choice of a specific model has been crucial to her expression. The model serves as a surrogate for herself – similar in build and stature, and (unbeknownst at the time of the model’s selection) the same age as when she went through her own profound, personal struggles. DeLoach paints rapidly – building up impossibly thick surfaces at breakneck speed akin to the meditation of a Sufi dancer. Her intuition and speed create the record of a transformative state – one in which the painter loses herself in order to find herself. The resulting work affords viewers the experience of this transcendent state independent of any knowledge of how or why the work was created.

Her choice of women as subjects recalls archetypes as old as painting itself. The tradition is (excuse the pun) a fertile one, from Botticelli, to de Kooning, to the feminist interpretations of Jenny Seville. DeLoach’s paintings serve as powerful counter-narrative to de Kooning’s misogynist “Woman Series.” While painted with the same brutality and violence, DeLoach’s women are not victims, and are unafraid to face the battles fought and lost and the battles they have wo 

 

Ultimately, what DeLoach has in common with the great tradition of impasto painting is faith. Whether secular or found in specific religious practice (DeLoach would most certainly not be the first to find religious faith as a source for painting) faith – the belief in something greater than oneself. Faith in the simple act of applying paint to canvas over and over and over, until that which is universal and true is revealed.

Bill Lowe
Bill Lowe Gallery, Atlanta, GA, 2015

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