ELLEN ROSEN Painter
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ELLEN ROSEN Painter - Collagist – Writer - Teacher "What I teach is the language of painting. The language is color, form, rhythm and structure. You have to learn the language before you can talk.” Esteban Vicente Ellen Rosen was born in New York City and has lived there her entire life. As a child she continually visited museums with her parents and later spent her teen years wondering the rooms of, the then much smaller, Museum of Modern Art, learning the work by heart. Rosen attended New York University where she studied with Helen Frankenthaler, Esteban Vicente, Milton Resnick, George Ortman and the critic and art historian Irving Sandler, among other which not only influenced her own work but enriched her extensive secondary carrier as a lecturer and teacher. In addition to attending NYU, from which she received a Bachelor of Science and a Masters, Rosen studied painting and art history at the University of California, writing and literature at Queens College and welding, sculpture and silver-smithing at Cornell University. She considers Frankenthaler and Vicente her major influences, along with Mark Rothko and Hans Hofmann. Coming from an Abstract Expressionist base, Rosen’s work has remained basically non-objective. Large, soft rectangles move in and out on the surface of the canvases, floating on color that often recedes and advances around the major forms. Color is an important component in her work. Each rectangle contains many small brushstrokes that live independently or combine to create amorphic forms within the larger mass. The edge of each rectangle vibrates and changes. There is a mixture of tension and atmosphere with no hard edges. Rosen has recently worked with collage on a smaller scale. Building and juxtaposing, mostly, rectangles of both image and color in odd and mysterious relationships, she adds or leaves words, which may or may not be related to the images. The words work as form and add mystery. Although these collages may seem a departure from her paintings they are, in fact, another manner of working with the same artistic, visual problems. The work speaks of Surrealism and, particularly Dada, as its influence. Once each work is complete it is scanned and presented as an ink jet print. It is difficult to tell in the smaller original and the ink jet print what is pasted on first and what was originally there. In the past few years Rosen has been working on a memoir as well as other smaller essays. She references her 65 volumes of journals but writes mostly from memories. She believes that words are like the forms and brushstrokes in a painting, creating images, feelings and even rhythm and sound. .