Ellen Phelan

From Detroit Artist’s Workshop

Ellen Phelan is a painter and photographer known for her hazy, romantic landscapes. Throughout her long and varied career, she has worked in multiple media, including oil, watercolor, pastel, gouache, photography, stencil, and collage. In the 1960s, Phelan embraced a violent brand of abstract painting influenced by postminimalism, for which she stretched, cut, and shredded her canvases into irregular shapes and sizes. However, her work took a significant turn after she began vacationing in the Adirondack Mountains in the late 1970s: Phelan took up plein air painting, creating atmospheric, diffuse landscapes reminiscent of Corot and Turner. After experimenting with heady, psycho-dramatic portraits of dolls, she revisited landscape, this time employing photography as a model for her paintings. Her moody still-lifes, landscapes, and paintings of old family photographs have been compared to the Merchant Ivory’s films and Marcel Proust’s prose. In her blurry, ethereal passages, Phelan maintains a rapport with 19th century Romanticism, exploring loss, memory, and the passage of time.

She has had solo shows at the Cincinnati Art Museum, the Baltimore Museum of Art, and the Wadsworth Atheneum and has been included in group exhibitions at the Kunsthalle Wien, MoMA PS1, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, among others.