The life of a painter has provided me with an opportunity to express my experience of being human in a complex and unknowable world, where certain things nevertheless appear to reflect great beauty and meaning. I have always been drawn to artists who work within the American tradition of sublime abstract painting and who are engaged in exploring seemingly defining elements of the human condition. I am a traditional painter in the sense that the material quality of my work is extremely important. For me there is a ritualistic process in building a surface and in developing images that grow from the interaction between their material base, perception and intuition. The physicality of mark making and the repetitive motions of working the canvas become an essential part of the subject of the painting. My use of color is purposely limited to extract the most powerful evocative and associative qualities. There are tensions of color relationships that I experience in the same manner as juxtapositions of sounds, and I frequently use those connections as a source for my painting. My work has cycled between periods of complexity and reduction. At its core is an attraction to strong energy and elemental forms. I work from an undifferentiated and open state, without a preconceived vision for the final product, and this allows for the possibility of surprise. To exist with ambiguity and incompleteness, and to attempt to draw forth from this ambiguity something that is surprising, powerful and often beautiful is central to my experience as a painter.
The paintings in the Shakti series are a continuation of work presented in the Oceanside Museum exhibition. In that show I was exploring states of quiescense, desire and outer expression. In the Shakti series I chose to develop the more outward of the impulses and to utilize an increasing complexity of pictorial elements.
~ Ellen Salk
