Ellen Wagener

Silver Birch

2024

I became interested in landscape painting because there were no confines, except the edge of the paper and an ever-changing display of color, rhythm, and texture outside my front door. Landscape painting is a method that expresses my inner response to and reverent feelings for nature. I look for connections between things—how one color flows into another, forms engage and separate, how one point in space influences another. The changes focused along the horizon are constant; they are governed by the seasons, the weather, or the cyclical nature of the agrarian landscape. There are no grand gestures, just subtle variations that, when combined, create a certain splendor. I convey in my paintings what is most pleasurable to me, such as discovering tenuous beauty in spontaneous cloud formations, and the repetition of endless corn and soybean rows captured on a rolling landscape. The process begins with a "drive-by-shooting" and a sketchbook. I make large pastel paintings in the studio using the photographs, detailed notes, finished smaller sketches, and memory of a given place. The paintings reflect the process of combining gathered information on site with my memory and intuitive response to a particular place and time. My paintings are about a presence, or a sense of place, rather than a specific site. They offer the viewer an opportunity for a second glance, something often missed while traveling the highway in a climate-controlled car.