The Jazz Series:
Paintings on Paper
Jazz has been the subject of my paintings on layered, collaged paper since 1990. Each series of works is based on a single jazz composition.
Yale Divinity School
Paintings from The River series on loan to YDS during 2024 for the dedication of the new Croll Family Entrance Hall.
Art in Embassies
Two Jazz Cubano paintings are on loan to the U.S. State Department for the U.S. Embassy Residence in Doha, Qatar. Selected by the ambassador and his wife.
Evolution of the Jazz Paintings
If I could say one thing to a person viewing my paintings for the first time, it would be, “Give them time to move.” That’s what grabbed my imagination over 30 years ago when I saw Cezanne’s late watercolors and oils at the Museum of Modern Art’s 1977 exhibition, “Cezanne: The Late Works.” I had never seen paintings that moved so magically between two- and three-dimensionality. Then there was the glorious translucence. I felt it was an artistic avenue laid out by Cezanne’s work, and not well explored by his successors. To me, Cezanne’s late paintings were the work of a man who saw the physical world in color densities – not solids and spaces – and all of it was dynamic. From his work, I recognized my own vision over the next several years.
Berman Museum of Art Exhibition & Jazz Performance
At Ellen Priest's 2007 exhibition of her jazz-based paintings, the Philip and Muriel Berman Museum of Art at Ursinus College in Collegeville, PA, brought pianist/composer Edward Simon and his Ensemble Venezuela into the Museum's Main Gallery to perform the Venezuelan Suite, Priest's subject matter and inspiration. In this video, one can see the paintings' layered, collaged surfaces.
Whyy “First”
Each week from 2016-2018 Philadelphia PBS Station WHYY explored issues ranging from the economy and education, to the arts and culture that make up the first state. “Ellen Priest doesn’t just listen to music; she paints it. First Experience shows how she blends painting to a certain beat.” February 9, 2018.
Evolution of the Jazz Paintings
The rough, blunt emotions and compositional athleticism of Abstract Expressionism also grabbed me in those years. I came of age in the Viet Nam era. I had a tough, no-roses view of the world and my place in it – and a big heart. (Not easy to reconcile.) I knew that the kind of spaces I was “seeing” intuitively were not real-world (realist) spaces. They moved differently. So I began painting gestural abstraction, with Cezanne always in the back of my mind.
Yale Divinity School
“Jazz Cubano: Color Improvisations”
Article by Timothy Cahill commissioned by YDS for the exhibition: “Ellen Priest’s art is inspired by jazz and tinged with spirit.”
The Delaware Contemporary
“On Being American/Jazz: Ryan Cohan's The River” was opened in March 2020 just in time to close ten days later at the outset of the covid pandemic.
Evolution of the Jazz Paintings
Fortunately, the artistic concerns of my early years have remained compelling and matured with me. My paintings today are abstract, multi-layered, translucent spaces full of color and light. At a distance the paintings read as spatial illusions. Drawn and painted forms drop deep behind the picture plane visually, or advance forward to meet the viewer. Color and underpainting help create space. Up close the pictures are layered relief-constructions made with superimposed layers of opaque and translucent papers, cut away in some sections or collaged with additional forms.
People Always Ask Me 2 Questions About My Work…
Why Jazz?
Jazz evokes in me what I want my paintings to evoke in their audience. I choose jazz compositions for their joy, emotional range and intellectual rigor.
Process? How do you make these?
See below to view photographs of works in progress in my studio and read the steps in my working process.
Living With Art
I’m happiest when my work is exhibited where people live with it for a period of time.
Those exhibitions for me have been in well-travelled spaces at Berklee College of Music and the Yale Institute of Sacred Music in 2012, at Saint Peter’s Church in midtown Manhattan in 2015 and 2019, and at Yale Divinity School in 2022 and 2024. At Saint Peter’s in 2019, roughly 1500 people per week used or visited the two gallery floors where The River Series hung for three months.
Passing the works many times daily or weekly, viewers begin a visual conversation with the paintings. I’m told the paintings seem to change, and change back, as viewers notice new movement, colors, shapes, feelings each time they see them.
An undergraduate reviewer from The Yale Herald wrote about his unexpected experience in 2012. Read review
Evolution of the Jazz Paintings
Since 1990 my subject matter has been jazz – a musical counterpart to the visual experience I try to offer in my work. Jazz that attracts me is full of joy and energy, able to transform sadness. I listen, study the score, and create my imagery with abstract-expressionist brush studies painted to capture the specific movement and sounds of that music. My compositional process is one of “choreographing” forms from the brush studies. Every decision is made with the music playing.
Covers
Edward Simon's studio recording of the Venezuelan Suite, released January 2014 by Simon and Sunnyside Records. The cover is Venezuelan Suite #23.
Learn what it means to be an artist today. Musicians, writers, visual artists, and creators from a variety of other disciplines discuss their lives and work—how they perceive their craft and their world, and the role of art in society.
Yale Divinity School and Yale Institute of Sacred Music Professor Thomas Troeger used Venezuelan Suite #6 on the cover of Music As Prayer, released in 2013.
The Kenyon Review with pieces from my Venezuelan Suite Series on the covers of all four issues in its 75th Anniversary year 2014.
Evolution of the Jazz Paintings
To my knowledge, my technical approach is unique. Experimentation was intense in the 1980’s and early 1990’s, often with the help of two museum conservators. I found then the standard building blocks I still use – heavy watercolor paper, two weights of tracing vellum, saturated colors painted with oil or flashe, pencil-drawn lines, and mineral spirits acrylic gel as my glue. The translucent papers and oil paint allow one to see, quite literally, an image through an image.
The Philadelphia Inquirer
“Joy of jazz lives up to its space”
This review by Victoria Donohoe appeared in The Philadelphia Inquirer, on Sunday, January 28, 2007.
Ellen Priest is a painter of celebrations. Her subject matter for 17 years has been jazz. "The jazz that attracts me is full of joy and energy, able to transform sadness," she has said.
Now her exhibit, "Ellen Priest: 'Jazz Paintings' on Paper: Improvisations on the Venezuelan Suite," is at Ursinus College. With this show, Priest dives headlong into the expectations that threaten to overwhelm any soloist who attempts to fill Ursinus' unusually large main exhibition room with paintings.
In this case, her 22 vinyl-based paintings on layers of cut paper are displayed in that huge space and an adjoining small room.
There is a sense of special occasion in these pictures by the Wilmington artist. The vast majority of these are grandly stylized, luminously colored, lyrical abstract works of large size, and it is only fitting that each should be a celebration itself. That's the effect of this handsome exhibit which, being epic scale, holds its own in that large space as few one-person shows have done previously.
Priest created this artwork in collaboration with Venezuelan Suite's composer, Edward Simon of Miami, and the music will be performed here Feb. 24. But in the end, this is Priest's show.
Those who have watched her work grow over the years will take deep delight, and the rest of us will be introduced to it. Priest is unmistakably a celebrator of the "big moment" here. It's good to see the Berman Museum has gone to such lengths artistically to make Priest's big moment at Ursinus memorable.
“Wilmington wonder, Part II”
This review by Victoria Donohoe appeared in The Philadelphia Inquirer on Friday, July 23, 2010.
Ellen Priest goes solo at the Delaware Division of the Arts Mezzanine Gallery in the Carvel State Office Building. A painter (with a master's from Yale Divinity School), Priest deliberately blurs the boundary between painting and jazz in her Venezuelan Suite painted collages. These use form as a language of music, as she angles and interlocks long, curling cornucopias of color to form a network of diagonals that move in and out of space over whole images. Seeing jazz as full of joy and energy, able to transform sadness, Priest uses it successfully here to create materialized movement in actual worlds of colored space.
Evolution of the Jazz Paintings
With “Jazz: Edward Simon’s Venezuelan Suite #1-23” – a four-year body of work completed in 2010 – my work intensified in two ways. First, I pushed harder visually on two pairs of opposing concepts – reality and illusion, and 3-D and 2-D – in all combinations. Second, my involvement with the music became more immediate, as I collaborated directly with Simon while he was composing his four-movement Venezuelan Suite and honing it through improvisation in live performances.