Alice Anne Ellis - draft Artist Satement

Alice Anne Ellis / Draft Artist Statement

I find that my painting is not so much making, as discovering  finding connections between shapes, finding echoes of stories in objects, and trying to find the essence of objects through simplification.

Since much of my inspiration comes from nature, I like to use leaves, twigs, and flowers to make marks.  They are not so much tools, as collaborators in the process.

I am also interested in symbols and writing. Letters seem to echo the human face, or physical objects. "O" makes the shape our mouth makes as we say it. "W" looks like a wave in water. Some pictograms can be traced to the objects they represent.

But let's abandon literacy and look at writing as just marks, like a child reading adult script, or a western eye looking at Japanese. We can appreciate the beauty of the letters as shapes, the paragraph as a shaded block. By taking away meaning, we add a layer of perception.

无为    -  Action without action.