A portrait by Ellen Eagle of a friend, who found out she had cancer around the time Eagle did her portrait.
The Glen Ridge Public Library currently has a display of pastel paintings by resident Ellen Eagle.
On view until Dec. 14 are 15 portraits and one architectural painting. Eagle’s work is in the permanent collection of the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, the Butler Institute of American Art, the Arkansas Museum of Fine Art, the Ming Gallery of Fine Art, Suzhou City, China and the Arts Students League, NYC, where she teaches.
The paintings, which are in the library second-floor display case, are small. She works small, she said, because that seems to fit her nature and quiet voice. Her goal as an artist, she explained, is to gain insight into the emotionality of her subject and pay tribute to structure and light.
“A lot of the people portrayed have posed for classes I teach,” she recently said of the display, sipping chamomile tea in a Herman Street cafe. “So I got to know something about their natures and felt confident when I asked them to come to my studio that we’d develop a good working relationship.”
She works in natural light, looking for the consistencies it reveals. But with the weather being a variable, her memory plays an important part.
“Everything has to be expressed in the same light conditions,” she said. “So, you have to remember. You can’t paint the hands as if it’s a cloudy day and the face as if it’s sunny.”
But while working with the model, observing them as they get into and out of the pose, conversing with them, seeing how they react, Eagle said her perceptions change, too. She sometimes paints a second portrait based on observations she made working on the first portrait. Also, her own thoughts may find an outlet, realize an expression, in a portrait. This was the case after she painted her best friend, Lisa. The painting would not be completed.
“My painting saw it,” Eagle said. “She was getting paler and paler. She only came once a week and at first, she was gazing at me. But then her gaze became inward. My painting kept reporting, but we had no idea she was sick until one evening, she had gone to the doctor and told me she had stage 4 cancer.”
Lisa did not survive. At about this time, a model named Miss Leonard began posing for Eagle’s class. As Eagle described her, she was sturdy, upright, unbroken, connected to something spiritual. The artist was absolutely captivated by this woman’s strength. Eagle said it was an antidote to her friend’s vulnerability. She painted Miss Leonard twice.
“The second painting was all about the beauty of her spirit, looking at the light on her and the strength of her structure,” Eagle said. “In the first painting her eyes were closed; in the second, she was very much awake.”
The colors an artist sees change according to the weather, the time of day, the weather and the season, she said.
“I hope to see less colors as I progress to help me unify the painting,” she said. “What colors persist and which are fleeting? My goals are very consistent. I just want to revel in the presence of the person I’m painting.
“I’m actually very simple,” she continued. “I just want to receive what the model is emitting and to pay tribute. It’s very simple, really.”
Eagle said she knows a painting is finished, technically, when the values, edges, colors and proportions seem to be “in the ballpark.”
“And that I’ve expressed my response to the model,” she added. “But it’s never done. It’s always a work in progress. This may seem indirect, but my mother was a seamstress and pattern maker. Pattern making is a work in progress and I’m part of my mother’s pattern.”
Eagle is currently working on a painting of her mother. After her tea, she will go home to continue working on it. But unlike other portraits, this one is from memory.
During the pandemic, Eagle did not have anyone in her studio. She had always worked from observation, but during this time, she reflected on her mother. This was close to how she thought about a model.
“My mother made a lot of clothing when I was a little girl,” Eagle said. “She made my wedding dress and clothes for my dolls. I have an image of this painting in mind and I’m painting it. I’m with her in the studio. I’m painting me from real life and her from memory. In the painting, she’s very young as I remember her as a little girl. She’s at work with her fabrics and threads and I’m my own age now.”
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