RETROSPECTIVE SPANS GENRES WITHOUT LOSING SPONTANEITY

0 Comments | Gazette, The (Colorado Springs), Jun 6, 2008 | by MARK ARNEST --

At first glance, the Ellen O'Brien retrospective that opens today at Cucuru Gallery and Cafe is almost bewildering: The work ranges from realism, to several flavors of modernism, to pure abstraction.

"Ellen went through every art scene, but also kept herself in her work," said artist Ceil Horowitz, who organized the show.

For O'Brien's first large-scale one-woman show since a 1974 Fine Arts Center exhibit, the Old Colorado City gallery and coffee shop will be crammed with more than 100 of O'Brien's works, some of which the artist herself hadn't seen in 40 years.

"It will be electric," said Horowitz -- "like a French salon, hung from floor to ceiling."

"It's an honor to have it here," said Cucuru owner Guillermo Alvarado. "I haven't seen such a strong body of work by one person anywhere in Colorado Springs."

O'Brien said she came to art naturally.

"My father was a naturalist," she said. "He taught me how to stretch and mount flowers. I learned the structure of plants."

Her technical skill, however, is the result of rigorous training. She followed up a solid art education at New York's Cornell University with a Master of Fine Arts from Detroit's Cranbrook Academy of Art. She and her husband, glass artist Vince O'Brien, then moved to Colorado Springs to study with Jean Charlot at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center, after which they spent several years in France, where Ellen O'Brien had received a scholarship to the Academe Leger in Paris. The couple then returned here, where they and their children were anchors of the local arts scene. (Vince O'Brien died in 1999.)

O'Brien's academic training is evident in "Stella," a 1945 portrait of a black woman holding a glass plate, which was O'Brien's graduation project at Cornell.

"The dark skin tones were a challenge," said O'Brien, "as was painting skin through glass."

A series of figure drawings and gouache paintings -- some of which Horowitz found rolled up and forgotten in O'Brien's house -- show O'Brien's ability to convey a single idea several times without losing freshness or spontaneity. All feature the same model, christened "Roseanne" in one gouache, but whose name O'Brien no longer remembers.

"Everybody in Detroit drew her," she said. "I couldn't do a bad drawing of her."

Or of anybody, said Horowitz: "A lot of artists paint as though they're copying a photograph, which loses the rhythm."

"Ellen's line is wonderful. Even the sketches are so clean."

And while O'Brien has artistic idols -- especially Picasso and Henry Moore -- she never falls back on formulas.

"You'll see her take a design, live with it, and come back 10 or 20 years later," said Horowitz. "But each time, it's changed. She breathes new life into it at every stage."

For O'Brien, putting the show together has been full of pleasant surprises as she surveys her life's work.

"Some of it's really very good," she said.

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ELLEN O'BRIEN RETROSPECTIVE

When: Opening 5:30-8:30 p.m. Saturday; regular hours 8 a.m.-6 p.m. Mondays-Wednesdays, 8 a.m.-9 p.m. Thursdays-Saturdays; through July 21 Where: Cucuru Gallery and Cafe, 2332 W. Colorado Ave. Admission: Free; 520-9900