Stephen Ellis
JMW Turner’s 'Shade and Darkness - the Evening of the Deluge’, 2020
coloured pencil and gouache on digital print on Fabriano paper
76.0 x 55.0 cm
Stephen Ellis has always posed objects on tabletops to create small worlds for his drawings. Now the pandemic has given the domestic interior and the still life a new significance – the world becomes smaller for all of us.
Ellis took the opportunity of the pandemic to teach himself the basics of 3D modelling software to make and pose virtual objects on virtual tabletops – a process that renders the familiar unfamiliar, reflecting pandemic isolations, remembered liberties outside. The intangible functionless objects stand in for the thing army that supports our lives, the mute democracy of the kitchen cupboard.
The cloudscapes quote from the Arctic and glacier paintings of William Bradford (1823-1892). The melt progresses, despite the pandemic pause.
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