Ellen Jouret-Epstein
Germantown, NY
Website
ejestudioart.com
Social Media
Instagram
How would you describe your work?
A reviewer once described my work as “some otherworldly mash-up of quilts and paintings and sculpture and something else altogether.” While that was written about a very different body of work, the description still comes close in my current work. Then and now, “something else” is what I aim to discover through my process. I work in abstract collage using a variety of materials that I like to think communicate with each other. I refer to the “conversation” of materials collaborating with form, mark and color.
Over time my work has evolved from pure abstraction to something more evocative of place and mood. I want to invite the viewer to think about what they don’t see along with the imagery in front of them.
For the past year I’ve been working with two different but related series of work. The Orbits Series is based on tight compositions of a single form, the circle. I’ve never worked this way before, with a limited vocabulary, a known form and unknown variations on a theme, so the pleasure of it has been revelatory. Simultaneous with that work, the Story Series begins with a single gesture, something inchoate, with no preconception of final form. As these collages have evolved they’ve begun to suggest a narrative. Both series are built on the same materials and a similar palette
What inspires you?
My greatest inspiration is the work of other artists, contemporary or not. The work I respond to won’t be directly evident in my own. But I will have taken something from it that feeds my process and choices. I also love being surprised by similarities in my own work and work that I discover for the first time. We’ve arrived or touched down at the same place from different beginnings. But your question also takes me back to where I begin, with the materials that I use. I have a visceral response to my materials that propels me to work.
Can you speak about your process?
My practice has developed through experimentation with a variety of media and techniques, including wet felting, aluminum foil, and now works on paper. My work is always a form of collage: compositions of different elements that cohere into a unique final form. I work with layering, contrast, texture and movement, as well as with mystery and chance, which is an especially important part of my practice.
I use torn papers, both borrowed and of my own making, most often on a vellum support. Vellum has qualities that I seek which other artists might want to avoid – it is both brittle and delicate. It’s also skin-like and has a life of its own. And it can buckle with wet media. At the same time, it helps me to create depth and radiance through its translucency, and it allows me to work on both sides of the sheet. Most often I use a 36 inch by 24 inch portrait sheet, which feels like “my size”.
Until the latest work, I primarily used magazine paper for the vibrant color, interesting shapes and the sense of movement in editorial photography. But my work took a leap forward when I began modifying papers myself. I create papers with rust and tea printing on tissue or trace paper. I also use a non-toxic solvent process to transform certain printed images and text into unexpected monoprints.
Each collage is layered with these borrowed or original papers. I start with one or more interesting elements and build the collage from there. A color palette develops early in the process. I begin to add acrylic ink or acrylic washes as well as colored pencil and graphite. I use image transfers of magazine text as a kind of field or ground for each collage.
I used to feel constrained about titling my work, but with these new bodies of work, titles have become an important part of my process. I use the magazine text image transfers as a kind of mark making, but they also become my titles. Before applying the text I scan the passages for interesting phrases which, out of their context, can suggest qualities of the collages. In this way they’re embedded in the collage and take on more meaning for me.
How did you become interested in art?
My mother claimed that at an early age I was asked what I like to do and I answered “to make things.” The only visual record of that is a couple of drawings, but I do recall a robust interest in shoe box dioramas, which probably fueled my later interest in landscape architecture. We had an “arty” aunt who took us to museums and had artist friends in the Village. But that was a pretty limited exposure. And I went through school feeling very self-conscious about making and showing art. But as soon as I graduated college (a degree in art history, from NYU, where I worked for an artist) I started playing with weaving. And through a job at the American Crafts Council I learned a great deal.
Soon after I moved to California and became very involved with the nascent fiber arts scene there for a decade or more. I made a living then restoring oriental rugs. Then I stopped doing art work in order to better earn a living and spent many years in arts nonprofits as an administrator and a grantmaker, and then became a landscape architect. As soon as I retired, decades later, I did so intending to get back to making art, which I did first by resuming work in fiber, this time with felt wall constructions. The rest is another story.
Do you have any favorite artists, movies, books, or quotes?
The answer, of course, is too many to mention. And they don’t necessarily provide a clue to what my work is concerned with. But yes, let’s start with Mark Bradford, Olga da Amaral, Jack Whitten, Agnes Martin, Lee Bontecou, Louise Bourgeois, and many artists working in the Hudson Valley.
I am a great lover of film, particularly international films, notably those of Ozu (I watch Tokyo Story once a year), the Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-Hsien, and the Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami. But again, too many to mention. I’ve been in a small book group for two or three years that challenges me a great deal.
Favorite books we’ve read include the works of Claire Keegan, Hisham Matar, Olga Tokarczuk, Han Kang. I’m reading a series of books now by Kapka Kassabova, a Bulgarian living in Scotland who manages to combine memoir, travel writing, mythology and geopolitics in her writing about southeast Europe I had a quote on my studio wall for a time, but I don’t remember what it said, so it couldn’t be very important.
What advice do you have for younger artists?
To keep at it, to find a way to keep working even when your life circumstances don’t easily permit an art practice. I regret not doing that when I faced having to make a serious living.
Any more thoughts about art, creativity, or anything else you would like to share?
Efforts like this, what you have created with Conversations with Artists, are so valuable.
They help create a community. And as artists, we come to learn that having a community is the most important thing we can do for our own selves and for our practice.
