SPOTLIGHT / Elise Ansel, Artist
Elise Ansel, Venus and Adonis, 2022. Oil on linen.
We were so excited to have Elise as our guest for March’s Spotlight - an inspirational little corner of Buonfresco, our subscriber newsletter, in which we invite a creative professional whose work we love to answer some questions tied to the monthly theme.
For March 2023, our theme was Back To It. Or refreshing. Or re- as a prefix attached to anything really. The opportunity to review, revisit, re-explore, or re-interpret. To embark on something again but anew and in a transformative way. We like to think of it as a spring clean and re-arrangement in order to make strides. And for this, Elise was a perfect fit to answer our questions on re-interpretation and painting.
Elise Ansel in her studio. Photo: Elise Ansel
Born and raised in NYC, Elise Ansel is an American painter now living in Maine. Her fluid abstract paintings are translations of Old Master and Mistress works into a contemporary language. Unravelling and reweaving, she harnesses energetic and broad, gestural abstraction to interrupt the representational content of art history and its male-dominant perspective. Elise has recently exhibited at Cadogan Gallery(London), Cove St. Arts (Portland) and Auxier/Kline (NY).
Refreshing, luminous and liberating, her paintings are exemplary in their sense of agency and control, evidencing the need to choose, take action and re-write the script. Arriving at a new point of view, where narrative focus is shifted to brushstroke and colour contemplation, her paintings are free. Yet they do not attempt to shake off their historical source material but to acknowledge, resonate and reinvent; to shine light from different angles and through a contemporary lens.
Elise’s brushstrokes are broad and decisive, sometimes lively and luscious, sometimes brisk and restless; always generous. There is something in her use of colour and high contrasts, and in the way her layering of paint toys with incandescence that is sweeping and mysterious in a manner suggestive of both brevity and depth; intangible mythologies dismantled on a breeze, a tension between seriousness and playfulness enacted behind a gauze.
In this interplay of obfuscation and statement, there is a concurrent sense of effacement and assertion that is a process of, and forces us to engage in, restructuring or reinterpreting. Meaning is intentionally obscured with finite edges, full stops, jumps between strokes, unexpected overlapping; the brush is writing a new language and inputting new punctuation. Our role as viewer is to actively read the paintings, to harness their power and energy, and to construct the new connections and meanings. Aside from this, there is undoubtedly something to be said for just looking at Elise’s paintings, just absorbing and letting them wash over you. They are beautiful.
Here are Elise’s interview responses below. We hope you enjoy reading them as much as we have.
Elise Ansel, Ariadne V, 2022. Oil on linen.
1. What are your top 3 Old Master/ Mistress paintings?
Titian’s Pietà in the Academia Museum in Venice; Supper in Emmaus by Caravaggio in the Pinacoteca di Brera in Milan and The Portinari Altarpiece by Hugo van der Goes at the Uffizi gallery in Florence.
These paintings are portals to another dimension. This version of Caravaggio’s Supper at Emmaus (an earlier version is at the National Gallery in London) is extraordinary in that it is a deeply spiritual painting, created while he was on the run from police, for having committed murder in Rome.
Amusing wall text referring to Caravaggio’s Supper in Emmaus, text by Tiziano Scarpa (The Pinacoteca di Brera). Photo: Elise Ansel
2. If colour is the protagonist, what elements do you consider as the setting and plot?
My art dealer Renato Danese came up with the phrase “colour is the protagonist.” It refers to the fact that, in my paintings, color takes center stage. The idea is that there is no setting or plot, that my response to the old master/mistress works is first and foremost visual. This creates freedom from the hegemony of narrative and the space-time continuum, and allows space for new narratives to be created, old stories to be transformed.
3. What helps you to get into a painting and where do you begin?
I begin with color combinations and compositional structure.
A recent large-scale watercolour, 30 x 22 inches. Photo: Elise Ansel
4. Do you think of your paintings/ painting in general as intertextual?
Intertextuality usually refers to the relationship between literary texts. I interpret intertextuality more broadly to also include ‘visual texts’ or paintings. My paintings are translations of Old Master works into a contemporary visual language, so in that sense there’s the relationship of the ‘text’ of the Old Master painting I am working with to the ‘text’ of the piece I am creating. Also many Old Master paintings spring from biblical or mythological stories or from ekphrasis, the use of detailed description of a work of visual art as a literary device, so those layers are in there as well.
5. Something old/ from another time you treasure or couldn't live without?
Many of the beautiful paintings in musuems.
Elise Ansel, Esther VI, 2022. Oil on linen.
6. Other than Old Master/ Mistress paintings, what other artists or artworks influence your practice?
Other visual artists I’m profoundly influenced and inspired by are Cézanne, Matisse, Joan Mitchell, Stanley Whitney, Frank Auerbach, Richard Tuttle and Gerhard Richter.
7. What are your most significant literary influences?
Upon reading James Joyce’s Ulysses and reflecting on its relation to The Odyssey, I was inspired not only by the use of a classical text to create a contemporary response, but also by the idea of using multiple stylistic approaches within a single work. I was particularly struck by the final Penelope/Molly Bloom chapter, a single unpunctuated stream of consciousness meditation written “in a female voice.”
8. A favourite quote or wise words or mantra?
"To thine own self be true" (Shakespeare) and "Doin' the things that they want to" (Lou Reed).
SEE MORE
Follow Elise on Instagram to see her current projects, and visit her website to view previous work.
Work in progress at Elise’s studio. Photo: Elise Ansel
““The joy of creative action transcends the linear construct of time and resolves the illusive duality of apparent opposites. My work celebrates the exhilarating thrill of finding new sources in art, in nature and in oneself, of hybridizing past and present, exterior and interior, subject and object, time and space.”
”