Ellen Phelan
American, 1943
Phelan was born in Detroit, Michigan, in 1943. She attended Wayne State University where she earned her B.A., M.A. and M.F.A. degrees. During her extensive career she has worked in a variety of media, including watercolor, oil, gouache, pastel, stencil, collage and photography. She began painting landscape scenes en plein air in the late 1970s after vacationing in the Adirondack Mountains. She is represented in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art, in New York City; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. She has had solo exhibitions at the Cincinnati Art Museum, the Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut; and the Baltimore Museum of Art. She lives and works in New York City, as well as Westport, New York, with her husband, artist Joel Shapiro.
“I have built a fairly complicated body of work over the years, but landscape has always been a big portion. When I was a younger artist, I worked very abstractly - in a post-minimalist world. Thus, I think these prints capture elements of abstraction and representations of landscape. It’s a synthesis of ideas I’ve had about landscape for quite some time. I’m sort of a romantic, you see. I’m interested in how beautiful the world really is and I hope that some of that comes across in these prints.”
