Ellen Priest, Jazz: Thinking Out Loud, Reaching for Song #7

Jazz: Thinking Out Loud, Reaching for Song #7, 2011 - Ellen Priest

About the Work

About Jazz: Thinking Out Loud, Reaching for Song #7

After finishing the Venezuelan Suite series, abstract artist Ellen Priest wanted to break her process open and chew through some new ideas. Experimentation demanded a quicker way of working. Priest turned to drawing—to her, the thinking-out-loud of visual art.

An NPR junkie, Priest had often heard the music of newly discovered jazz musicians, especially those from Africa and Latin America, who made their way into the US jazz scene via Berklee College of Music in Boston. "Oh, if I could be a bird in the room listening to classes...," she says. What better way to fuel her own improvisation than to listen to music-in-progress?

Berklee's Department of Liberal Arts, as well as music faculty and the Global Jazz Institute welcomed Priest. Jazz: Thinking Out Loud, Reaching for Song is her new body of drawings, brush studies, and collaged paintings from that project.

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About the Artist

About Ellen Priest

Ellen Priest's inspiration comes from surprisingly diverse sources. Life-long visual art influences include Cézanne's late watercolors, Matisse's color and compositional structure, and ...Read More

Ellen Priest's inspiration comes from surprisingly diverse sources. Life-long visual art influences include Cézanne's late watercolors, Matisse's color and compositional structure, and Abstract Expressionism, especially the paintings of Willem De Kooning and Joan Mitchell. She is also inspired by rhythmic and harmonic structures in jazz and African and Latin American music, and has used jazz as the subject for her layered, collaged paintings since 1990. Most recently, she completed a four-year body of work titled Jazz: Edward Simon's "Venezuelan Suite" #1-23. Her own athletic pursuits come into play in her art, since her paintings are really about movement. Priest's favorite sports are "balance sports," such as skiing, where motion depends on weight and balance thrown off-center, often in response to terrain.

Priest has received two Pollock-Krasner Foundation Awards. Her first solo museum exhibition was presented by the Philip and Muriel Berman Museum of Art at Ursinus College in 2007.Read Less

Jazz: Thinking Out Loud, Reaching for Song #7, 2011

by Ellen Priest

Works on Paper

Description

Flashe and pencil on rag paper.

Authentication

Signed by the artist on lower right of recto.

Shipping

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