Flashe & pencil on paper. Unframed.
This work is part of a series titled Jazz Cubano.
This series builds on Priest’s long fascination with Cuban Jazz.
She analyzes the space and movement created by the complex rhythms of this musical style and attempts to reconstruct them abstractly.
She mimics the layered complexity of the Cuban Jazz through the physicality of her works.
From afar the surfaces of her paintings appear flat, but up close their collage elements add dimensionality, blurring the line between two and three-dimensional space.
Ellen Priest is an American abstract artist who is inspired by music and most notably by jazz. She lives and works near Philadelphia.
Jazz has been her subject matter since 1990. Drawing is always central to her process, as well as standing on its own.
The artist's inspiration comes from surprisingly diverse sources: • Life-long visual art influences include Cezanneʼs late watercolors, Matisseʼs color and compositional structure, and Abstract Expressionism, especially the paintings of Willem De Kooning and Joan Mitchell.
The rhythmic and harmonic structures in jazz and related African and Latin American music.
Her athletic pursuits, since her paintings are really about movement. Priestʼs favorite sports are “balance sports,” where motion depends on weight and balance thrown off-centre, often in response to terrain, like skiing.
