Elements and essence: in her meticulously worked paintings of a natural world not so much idealized as distilled, Sharon Ellis attains a physical intensity that shades undiminished into the spiritual. Two recent shows, a 10-year survey and a series of new works, reveal this L.A. artist at her devotions - Biography

For the past 10 years, Sharon Ellis has been making paintings of nature transfigured. Each blade of grass in her landscapes yearns sinuously upward; each leaf strikes a graceful, balletic pose. Every raindrop is articulated individually as a glint of fire in fluid suspension. Every star in her skies is a shard of crystalline perfection, and every sky performs spectacles on the order of the aurora borealis. Ellis orchestrates these scenes meticulously and often symmetrically, so that the paintings project a supernatural sense of order and unity. Zealous in their beauty, they invoke a religious kind of rapture, a sacred thrill. These are devotional paintings, celebrating the genius and invention found in the physical world, but also the experience of epiphany itself and its origin in the imagination.

Ellis lives in Los Angeles, works on one canvas at a time, and completes just three or four per year. Her process is highly deliberate, yielding forms and surfaces of pristine clarity. Painting in layers of thinned alkyd (as many as 60 in one painting), she renders every element in a scene with crisply defined contours, then reiterates the edges in lighter or darker tones, generating a sense of both depth and movement. An exhilarating mix of hot and cool colors--tangerine and lime, crimson and emerald--electrifies the images.

Painting by painting in her stunning survey show, "Evocations: Sharon Ellis, 1991-2001" (organized by Martin Betz for the Long Beach Museum of Art), Ellis nullified conventional distinctions between representation and abstraction, the natural and supernatural. In Lunarium (1996), a chorus of flowers with milky white veins and carmine edges opens to receive the light of the radiant full moon high above. The span of sky between them sizzles with ornate tracery, an elaborate symmetrical pattern laid down in translucent layers of aqua, cobalt, Prussian blue, sapphire. Physical phenomena register as exaggerated and yet concentrated. In its emblematic expression of personal passion, Lunarium recalls the schematic drawings of the German Romantic Philipp Otto Runge. In its visionary extravagance, we glimpse the world of Blake.

Garden Abstract (2001) is one of several recent works painted in response to poems, in this case one by Hart Crane. Here an apple tree stands in blood-red translucent silhouette, a leafless, veiny thing juggling a halo of perfectly round fruit. Curving spokes of white stars radiate from the center of the canvas, penetrating a glorious, wavering shroud of seaweed green, mint and sherbet orange. Snippets of periwinkle sky refresh the exposed spaces between the branches and the weirdly corpuscular atmospheric mass. The structure of the painting reveals itself as do those anatomical diagrams with transparent overlays illustrating the separate skeletal, circulatory, pulmonary and muscular systems. The same brilliant simultaneity at work in the body is operating all around us, the image attests. We simply must be attentive and present to it. Ellis cites Waiter Pater's defense of beauty, and art for art's sake, as the most promising path toward such fulfillment: "To burn always with this hard gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy," he wrote, "is success in life."

The physical intensity of Ellis's paintings blends indistinguishably into their spiritual intensity--another dichotomy debunked. The same goes for their intimate scale (most works measure between 22 and 40 inches per side), which does nothing to diminish their vast scope. Their immediacy, too, their crystallization of a finite rhapsodic moment, manages to coexist with a broader sensation, of life as one prolonged ecstatic shudder.

Time and its passage have been recurring subjects for Ellis over the years. She has painted a series on the times of the day, and another on the seasons. In The Four Seasons (1999), she followed the lead of her inspiration, Charles Burchfield, in compressing the entire annual cycle into a single image. As Burchfield did in his 1949-60 painting of the same name, Ellis structures the scene along a central axis formed by a cathedral like gateway of silhouetted trees. Burchfield painted green summer leaves on one side of the canvas and the flame-red leaves of autumn on the other, while Ellis has them each fluttering down on both sides of the intricate black grillwork of branches. Snowflakes sheathed in soft gray orbs float from the top down the sides of her painting; ribbons of grass arabesque their way up from the bottom. Ellis has visualized the circularity of the seasons through emblems, colors and varieties of light layered as snugly as nesting dolls within the frame of the canvas. She jolts us into the rhythm of nature's pulse, and into recognition of the miraculous real.

Into these harmonious scenes, Ellis has folded not only a bit of Burchfield, Blake and the Northern European Romantics, but also the elegant linearity of Art Nouveau, the exacting reverence of manuscript illumination, the cartoonish ebullience of film animation, maybe even the slick bravado of Southern Californian surfboard and hot-rod decoration. At the same time, she's become more and more comfortable within the traditions of landscape painting. In her newest work, shown last spring at Artemis Greenberg Van Doren (her first solo exhibition in New York), Ellis depicts the four elements--as landscapes.