About Ellen Kantro

Ellen has worked in a variety of media from oil paint to wood veneer to acrylics. Prior to leaving the corporate world to paint full time, she worked as a graphic designer, art director and creative director at firms as varied as boutique graphic design studios to the largest financial institutions. 

Primarily self-taught as a painter, she points to Robert Raushenberg and Jasper Johns, as well as many living contemporary artists as having influenced her style and love of texture and collage.I have been visually creative in one way or another for decades. It is hard to say what drives me other than striving to create paintings that achieve balance and harmony and that just feel "right." 

"I begin each new painting by applying something (anything!) onto the surface. Whether simple marks, paper, or random color blocks, each element informs the next, and the process becomes largely intuitive. Layers of paint and paper are laid down, scraped off and painted over until a history develops. Each element that I add (or remove) creates a problem that I need to solve which is both exasperating and liberating.

I enjoy building up and obliterating layer after layer, and what emerges is always unpredictable and open to interpretation.

Many of my paintings incorporate typographical elements. Numbers, characters, cursive hand lettering, or foreign alphabets are obscured under layers of paint to be found when you least expect to see them."