Tertulia Andaluza (magazine)

"Ellen Zaks is a British visionary painter. She has exhibited extensively in the UK and her work is in many collections world-wide.

 

Ellen is fascinated by the theories of quantum physics, which tell us that there is a secret dance of energies that we are not aware of with normal vision: heat, magnetism, and even the electrical activity of our thoughts and emotions. In this greater reality human beings become interpenetrated by their surroundings, and in Ellen's work normal boundaries no longer exist. Like Tintoretto, Ellen paints the soul not the figure allowing us to see into the metaphorical darkness with heightened vision.

 

Her painting is informed by the fact that she has been a dancer all her life. “I paint as a dancer and begin with a figure in motion, for I see that movement is in everything... It is the dance of life within the living universe.

 

Ellen's line and gesture are expressive in a similar way to dance and can evoke Egyptian art with their stylization and purity. Paint (sometimes squeezed straight from the tube) adds a robust physicality with jewel-like lozenges punctuating a unique language of paint.

 

She breathes life into her figures like Rodin breathed life into sculpture and her rich paint qualities give us a feast of lavish, glowing colour, delicate blooms and vivid washes of amazing chromatic intensity that conjure up Matisse or sometimes in their delicacy William Blake."

Ellen has just returned from a very successful art residency in Georgia. Her painting was selected to be exhibited permanently in Mtskheta Palace of Culture.

 

You can see her work in ‘Corpus’, showing May/June at the Blackheath Gallery, London.