Clark Ellithorpe
Constructed Paintings
I received my MFA from Northern Illinois University in 1980 after previous working as a research biologist. I had always worked as a painter to put myself through school. When it came time to move into Chicago to find studio space, I put my painting skills to use and learned faux-painting as a way to support my artistic career.
A few years later I joined a cooperative gallery group called Space 900. I have been a member now for 30 years.
My paintings evolve through the manipulation of collaged shapes, which are “painted into” and also “pulled out” using masking techniques. My influences range from Art Brut and Dubuffet, Paul Klee and imagery from my earlier life as a scientist.
A few quotes shed some light, I think, on my impetus to make art.
“Art does not reproduce the visible, rather it makes visible.”
“I begin where all pictorial form begins, with the point that sets itself in motion."
Paul Klee
“If anything ever does work in my case it works from the moment when consciously I didn’t know what I was doing. It really is a question in my case of being able to set a trap with which one would be able to catch the fact at it’s most living point.”
Francis Bacon
“In the end, what we are doing in all art is simply making our way back to life, shattering with all our force the ice of the habitual and rational which instantly conceals over reality and keeps us from seeing it.”
Marcel Proust
