Ellen McMahill

Each human being has a story. Each visual artist is telling a different story about a private perspective of the world made public through image form, color, concept. Ellen believes she is the fruit of her history and the explorer of the present and future. With insight and compassion her history becomes the knowledge she uses to imagine her art and the contribution she can make to the world through it.
On a linear, ordinary level her life has been a labyrinth of experiences which seemed to distract her from being a visual artist at all. In fact, those experiences allowed her to understand the world and herself deeply enough to be able to create on canvas her vision of this life on earth.
She graduated from Florida State University in Tallahassee, FL in 1973 with a degree in art unaware of the long journey ahead. In 1977 she learned to make tapestries on a small hand loom and bought a large tapestry loom (6’ x 6’) the same year. From then until 1999 she made large tapestries. She participated in art shows, winning one Best of Show and some honorable mentions. She was the area director of Florida Craftsman, a large fine crafts organization, for Northwest Florida for a year in the 1980s. She had solo shows in Tallahassee, Florida. She understands the necessity of participating in the political process of art, and all this happened while she was involved in her personal life of relationships and work.
In 1999 she decided to switch mediums because she felt that tapestry weaving was no longer the direction she wanted to go in. She went through a period of pen and ink drawings with one solo show in Tallahassee, FL in 2002 at a small gallery called Nomads. In January of 2003 she felt a strong desire to paint though she had never felt like painting before. The feeling became so overwhelming that she finally got all the materials together and started painting. It was the most satisfying creative activity she had ever done. It was simply her time to paint.
When her daughter left home to be on her own in 2004 she moved too and went to Atlanta, GA, the largest city close to where she had spent most of her adult life. It was a very lonely time for her, but she got serious about painting and being an artist and met a couple of experienced artists there who helped jer become more focused and professional. After several months and some additional moving around, she ended up moving to Los Angeles in January 2006. She learned a lot more about painting in Los Angeles before packing up again to move to Sacramento in late 2007.
She is now focused on the interaction between the artist’s inner world and the viewer’s perception of what the artist has created. As an artist what she wants to express and how will the viewer see the juxtaposition of images, colors, lines and symbols she paints on her canvases? What do people actually see and what do they pay attention to? How do the eye and mind experience a painting when everything we see is affected by past experience, when we so often look with eyes and mind that already have preconceived ideas about what we think we are seeing?
She finds that her task is to draw the viewer into paying attention by presenting ideas in a way that asks the mind to think beyond our ordinary perceptions. She is expressing her inner world as she engages the audience in re-viewing their own inner world and possibly understanding themselves and others in a new way.