Ellen Granter
“My paintings express my passion for my favorite subjects, and my desire to create images that are beautiful and pure. For me, the point is not to create a souvenir of a place, or an accurate illustration, but rather to try to capture the barest essence and to create luminous, sparely composed paintings while still revealing emotional undercurrents. I enjoy stripping away detail and balancing the composition over large fields of color, making small spaces between things, and overlooked everyday subjects come more clearly into focus.”
And that is exactly what Ellen Granter does with oils on canvas or on wood panels - make the everyday objects around us stand out. Her studio is a tiny spare bedroom in her house near Boston, with one wall completely full of art books.
Ellen grew up in upstate New York and received a BA in political science and a masters in Chinese history from the University of Vermont. She studied Mandarin Chinese for seven years and lived in Hong Kong and Beijing. After moving to Boston, she became a graphic designer. As an antidote to the constraints of her computer-intensive graphic design career, she began painting. As time went on Ellen became integrated with painting. To brush dabs of oil on a surface in a human effort to capture the sublime is a challenge that has made her hyperaware of the textures, shapes, and patterns of daily life. She believes that a beautiful painting is both a gift of vision and a testament of appreciation for our short lives here on this beautiful Earth.
Ellen currently works as a book designer for an educational textbook publisher, creating instructional design that helps children learn math, social studies and science. Her artwork is shown in numerous galleries throughout New England and is present in many international corporate collections. Although she is involved in a Monday night painting group, and has been since 1993, Ellen does not have formal art training except for a drawing and a painting class in college. Hers is truly a natural talent, nourished mostly by her artist’s statement above.