Audrey Ellington doesn’t title her artwork. There are so many complicated emotions and colors swirling in one painting that it’s too difficult to stamp a definitive title on it. Let people see what they want in the paintings, she says. If I could title her works, they’d have names like “Lizards in a Whirlpool” or “Venus Flytrap in Jazz Boogie” or “Golf Course on an Asteroid” or “Firecracker Ghost.”

Ellington’s work is vibrant, alive, teeming with possibilities that take the viewer into that indescribable dream state that the artist can only truly explain with paint. Ellington, who recently moved with her husband to Alarka just outside of Bryson City, has a gallery exhibit now showing through Thanksgiving at the Spring Street Café in Sylva.

The 19-piece exhibit is a mix of acrylic paintings, charcoal drawings, watercolor paintings and prints. Even if abstract expressionism isn’t your preferred style, a stroll past these evocative creations will send your mind wandering off to some newly discovered realm — cosmic or terrestrial or microscopic — and there is some subconscious connection the mind makes when colors are forged out of pure expression.

Ellington began painting as a child. At 15, she got some acrylic paints and loved the feel of it, the mess of it, the mix of colors on a canvas. She took on creative jobs as a florist and cook and took some art courses at Pike’s Peak College in Colorado Springs, Col., but it wasn’t until about 1987 when she met a neighbor across the street in Orange Park, Fla., that she found her truest inspiration — Helen Frankenthaller. The neighbor was an artist who offered Ellington some studio space and showed her some of the work of abstract expressionist Frankenthaller. Ellington was hooked. She enroled at Florida School of the Arts and the portfolio exploded. Now her work is shown in private and corporate galleries throughout the Southeast.

“Each piece is an inner collection of my soul,” Ellington explains. “All my works are untitled so that the viewer will have no preconception of its meaning and thereby relate to it from his own point of reference.”

While Ellington does watercolors “on location” (on hikes where the natural setting serves as inspiration), she prefers her acrylic paintings which are done on the floor instead of a traditional easel. She wets the canvas with water and then pours on the colors, spreading them into various textures and shapes. Though she doesn’t have preconceived ideas of what the painting will turn out to be, she does have an idea of the colors she intends to use. It’s really a workout for her. She puts her whole body into the strokes which are made with cardboard, hands and sometimes a paintbrush.

“That kind of gives me the freedom to put on the canvas what I want to put on the canvas,” she says, explaining that she enters a dream state in the flow of a painting. “It feels great, let me tell you. You want to feel it again and again and again. I’m exhausted after I’m done painting.”

No expensive tubes of paint from the fancy art stores either. House paints from Home Depot do just fine, she says. In each piece, she tries to find something that comes together — a shape, a certain color, a movement. Occasionally, there’s that piece that comes together in one long spell, but more often, it’s a process of painting and painting over again.

Ellington’s exhibit will be on display through Thanksgiving as part of the rotating gallery program at Spring Street Café in Sylva.

 

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The Smoky Mountain News