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ELLEN HATHAWAY
ARTIST STATEMENT
For me, painting is prayer, a gateway for inward reflection and outward expression on the beauty and mystery of God's love.
The open silence of an untouched canvas calls to me. And I respond by making personal marks and gestures, mixing media, using a brush, even my hands, building texture, pushing color, scratching paint away all while considering color, texture, and space. The physicality of transforming a canvas generates more and more possibilities. With every mark, color, or texture - added and hidden - a dynamic and rich surface comes to life. I fuse present, memory, and hope into one “painting experience”. This “painting experience” is not an ending, but rather a new beginning giving life to a beauty and mystery all its own – a created space where we relate, remember, and imagine – a space of sacred healing.
The beauty of art is that it can flow among artist and viewer making revelations to each of us in personal ways. Your invited to see, feel and experience.
"Arise, my darling. Come away with me, my beautiful one." Song of Solomon 2:1
Ellen Hathaway
Ellen Hathaway wants to make beautiful marks. A southern artist, Hathaway was raised in Washington, NC, where camellias bloom in winter, cypress balls drop in summer, and she made sand cakes on the shore of the Pamlico River. With degrees from UNC and UVA, Ellen then studied abstract expressionism with Stephen Aimone beginning 2014. Hathaway gains inspiration from American Modernists such as Georgia O’Keefe, Helen Frankenthaler, and Joan Mitchell for innovative approaches to composition, paint applications, and interpretation. She states about her art,
“Art is relational - be it between art and artist, art and viewer, or artist and viewer.
For me, painting celebrates new life, where endings flow into beginnings. I want to create a beautiful space – an intimately, personal interpretation alive with sensuous rhythms of intense color, palpable texture, and mixed media. The question, where one ends and the other begins ignites my process.
For you, there is nothing to understand in my paintings, only to see, feel, and experience with the senses.
The painting invites us to just be, one with the other.”
After raising their family and living in Charlottesville, Va for 30 years, Ellen and her husband, Curtis, now reside in Raleigh, NC. Her work has been placed in private and corporate collections from Massachusetts to Texas. Creating her marks makes Ellen feel beautifully alive.