Toronto painter Jacqueline Ellins is one of those artists who have kept abstract painting very much alive in spite of the predictions by many Post-Modernists of its demise.  Abstraction has shown an ability to renew itself with continual variations as artists have created their individual visions.  Like so many artists Ellins was inspired by the achievements of the New York School, but crucial to her development was an  encounter with the paintings of the Swiss artist Richard Lohse.  His work is not well known in North America, but the pictures are formed by rectangles of colour.  It is the colour rectangles, not the forms that are the point of the paintings, and they proved to be a catalyst for Ellins, as they inspired a confidence in the power of colour itself.  Her own contribution is what she called whimsy. This may seem a very light-hearted term for serious art, but perhaps it captures her approach better than more pretentious expressions might.
 
When we look at Ellins paintings we see a tremendous range of irregular forms that cannot be described in words.  There are blobs with very different textures, splashes of paint, straight lines that are not quite straight, amorphous dissipating clouds of colour and a host of other colour elements.  Often these forms seem to float in an uncertain space and, at times form that space.  A few of the forms have vaguely biomorphic qualities that are accentuated because they appear to float in colour/space.  I have emphasized the ungraspable qualities of everything because this seems to me one of Ellins strengths.  She avoids all the easy references or symbols that were created by the Surrealists and that have become worn out, but are still used as a ready source by lazy or uncreative artists.  In Ellins Mystical Morning for example, the pink blob on the right cannot be identified as an undersea form though it seems to float.  It takes its meaning from its relation with the other colour/forms and it is crucial to the picture, but it has no significance in itself.
 
Particularly important are the spaces Ellins creates for the play of forms.  The spaces vary enormously, some deep, some almost flat, and some are part of  forms themselves as in Mystical Morning.  This combination of infinitely varied forms acting in such richly evoked spaces is the strength of Ellins  work.  While we recognize the continuity in her work, it is always fresh.   In Inside the Box (see artfocus.com) she even introduces horizontal and vertical lines that create a different structure from the other pictures, though, being Ellins, the lines are not quite horizontal or vertical.  Important is the fact that she avoids the temptation once she has evolved a successful result to turn it into a formula, which unfortunately has been a feature of many modern artists works.  The wide range of colours in the paintings also play their part in the continual exploration of new possibilities.  The pictures are large and while reproductions illustrate well the inventiveness in the creation of both forms and colour concepts, they cannot do justice to the experience of the paintings themselves.

Author: Gerald Needham is Vice-President of Aica Canada Inc., the Canadian Branch of the International Association of Art Critics, founded by UNESCO and based in Paris, France