Elizabeth Kelley Erickson is a painter based in Maine. We’ve been friends for over twenty years. It’s been ages since we’ve done a studio visit, so on my last two visits home to Maine, in September and again in January, we made the time to sit down in her studio and chat about the work she’s been making lately. We talked about her inspiration, her recent move to California and back home to Maine, as well as her upcoming show at Frank Brockman Gallery in Brunswick, Maine that opens on Saturday, March 7th.
Becca Grady: Can you start off by talking a little bit about your work and what you do?
Elizabeth Kelley Erickson: Through painting, drawing, art + yoga, and archeology, I’m exploring nature, relationships, culture, and consciousness. I’m following three seemingly separate internal calls: painting, art that comes up out of yoga and meditation, and archeological art. All three areas have come on really strong in my life and I’m searching for the intersection, to see how they might take form in a way that makes sense. All of them are connected to place and to making work that comes out of an experience. All the work is about nature: nature as in the natural and human worlds, and the spiritual nature of things. Meanwhile, archeology has me delving into both my imagination and science about this magic little archipelago of islands in Cape Porpoise, Maine. I have always felt that it is my soul’s home. There is such a draw for me to experience this place. It is constantly changing. It’s a real living relationship I have with this land. I just want to be out there: exploring every tidepool, knoll, nook, the mudflats, and all the geological flows and features. There is a lot of evidence of humans in the junque that is washed up, and with how our human activities affect intertidal life. I want to know all the stories, including the histories and layers of human occupation, while also acknowledging the sense of impermanence with regards to the future and climate change.
BG: You've been painting and drawing for a long time now. Can you talk a bit about how you got started?
EKE: Well, I must have let enough of my desire to work as an artist be seen and there were a few key people in my life who caught that. They mirrored it back to me, offering encouragement and support. My friend Jeannie, who just passed away, had me start with scribble drawings. This entailed putting on some music, waving the pastel in the air (charcoal, brush, anything) as if you were conducting the music, and letting it flow onto the page. It took a combination of internal drive and external support to break through fear and actually get things moving. I took classes, went to figure drawing groups, and started painting out in the landscape. I began running with a group of artists and we would plan painting trips and call it “Art Camp”. There was a lot of talent in that group and they were all so generous, I learned from everyone. We showed work together and a lot of us are still dear friends. That crew and my teachers and early encouragers effectively performed an act of midwifery that brought my work into the world. It is so important to encourage one another. I take the opportunity to encourage other artists whenever I can.
BG: So, you were my introduction to figure drawing. I still remember all those nights going to the figure drawing group with you way back when. Is the group still around and do you still go? How do figures show up in your work today? Has that changed, evolved over the years?
EKE: Oh, wow Becca, I remember meeting you as a teenager. You had an uncanny wisdom and were already an independent thinking artist. Yes! The groups are still happening, I go when it fits with my overall workflow. It is always helpful to work the drawing chops and I love re-connecting with my home-team of artists. A couple years ago I was inspired by my interest in working with shapes to take a workshop with Ken Kewley. He is a master teacher and has a great way of working small compositions with hand-painted paper. After that workshop I started working directly from the figure with collage. It is a great way to explore the integration of figure in space as well as to work with observational abstraction which has been a long term pull for me.
There are other long held figure ideas gestating but it remains a mystery as to when they will take form, but they have to do with letting the charcoal fly on a large scale and relate to the collages in terms of straight-line construction. Figures come up through the art & yoga too. These are coming from memory, sense impressions, the subconscious. Usually they are gestural or little figural blobs and flying or dancing or doing things in the landscape.
BG: You lived in California for a while, and then came back to Maine. Did living in California shift any perspectives in your work? Immediately I think about the difference in light between the two coasts. Is that something that you notice or think about? Has your work changed being back in Maine?
EKE: Yes, I definitely tapped into the brights out west, it is really funny to look through all my older “gray” paintings of New England landscapes compared to what came out after I started painting vegetation and botanical forms out in California. I also got really into yoga. I literally went out to buy fluorescent paint because it seemed like the vibration of the plants was so high. It was so LA, I’d have a morning green drink, go to a phenomenal yoga class, and get to work painting next to a massive cut leaf philodendron. I found out that philodendron translates to ‘Love-Tree’ so that became the name of that series.
I moved to California right after finishing my MFA in painting. Being out of school and in a totally new place there was a freedom to explore and reconnect with what and how I wanted to paint. I ended up squelching my expression during the MFA experience so I could do what I needed to do for the program. Once I got to California, I experimented more. The internal and external light and energy affected me, my paintings got bigger, more expressive, and the color came back. That energy and language is part of me, and it is coming out in the work I’m making now that I’m back in Maine. The thing about California was that the influences out there tapped into a part of me that had been dormant: the light, the joy, the energy, the friends I made, teaching art, teaching Kundalini Yoga, the huge creativity. It was so fun. I do miss LA, my friends, all the art, artists, yogis and definitely although I also love wintertime in Maine, the weather. I’m glad to be back in Maine though, to get grounded, to settle into my studio, and let the work integrate.
BG: You've been working on a series of paintings of rocks. Can you tell me about them, and how you're thinking about them now? I'm especially interested in hearing about these three large, colorful ones that you've just finished. I love these paintings - they are so strong and vibrant, not quite of the ocean but absolutely of the ocean. It's almost like what you would see if you were at the water's edge on a really sunny day and you stared at the sun for too long and then closed your eyes, and in your mind’s eye you saw the same scene but abstracted into vibrant colors. These began as smaller studies that you painted on the island in Stage Harbor, and then made them larger, correct? Does anything change or shift with them once they become larger? How do you approach the color in these?
EKE: Thanks Becca! I love your afterimage impression. I’m so glad you got the sense of sitting next to the ocean. This is really what they are about, that experience of sitting amongst the seaweed covered rocks. The intertidal zone is totally my muse right now. There is so much life and magic and metaphor in this place between the low and high tide marks. I’m working something out on a deep level here. It feels like the key reason I had to come back to Maine. This flow of paintings started back in the summer of 2017, with the small paintings done out on the islands. I had been working out there with big shape breakdown, with observational abstraction. The application was brushy and gestural. Then my painting buddy Janet Ledoux and I took a field trip to the Museum of Fine Arts. I saw a little Arthur Dove painting of the night sky. I was struck by the simplified and contained shapes and the mystery of Dove. The next day when I went out to the island, I was painting on the far side of the island and I had the most amazing sensation: my body was tingling and I truly felt this one-ness, an order, a rightness of everything with everything. I was painting away feeling grateful and amazed at it all. I was capturing shapes of the light on the seaweed, the rocks, the surface of the water, and small breaking waves. They were all coming out more contained like the Dove painting, but it was less representational. My alarm started going off and I could hear the faint chimes, but I just kept painting. I was half-sitting on a rock with my leg extended in a tidal gully, and I could feel the tide rising up my leg! I had to get back, so I did not get caught in the tide, but I just kept painting. Then a little mink popped up on a rock about 5 feet away, went behind a rock and dropped into a pool nearby and disappeared. What a gift, I was given this non-dual experience, totally one, totally happy. I packed up really quick and felt like I danced across the rocks to get back. I had to go through the mud, wading home while holding my kit and the painting up out of the water. I did a couple more paintings over the next few days like that, and then the following week, I headed back to LA and started working on the larger versions of these paintings in the studio. It was as much about savoring the raw beauty of those days in the intertidal as it was about building images in the studio. I kept the colors pretty consistent, they are bright, but it was important to get the deep color sensation of being amongst the seaweed rocks. Shortly after that, we moved back to Maine. After getting my studio space set up, I brought the paintings back out of storage. I just finished and delivered them to Frank Brockman Gallery in Brunswick, Maine for a show. These paintings are part of a larger series called Rocks and Sea that I’m still working on, out on the islands and in the studio.
BG: You also have a series of more meditative paintings, the circle drawings. How do you make these? They look so good altogether, seeing the differences in patterns.
EKE: Thanks for that, they are really experience paintings. It is phenomenal where art can take you, what it can show you about yourself if you let it. That series comes directly out of my yoga and meditation practice. I have the materials set up and move right into making after a yoga set and meditation without breaking the energy. So, the art comes right out of the meditative current. There are a lot of surprises with what comes out onto the page, it can get pretty personal. I’ve been using this method to connect more intuitively with nature too, working outside and feeling for the pulse of the setting I’m in, whether it be the garden or the intertidal zone. It’s a way to listen to the earth, which is so important to our collective vision. It feels like magic when the imagery of the ancients flows out of the brush, and how what I’m learning through archeology rises up. I have to thank my teacher and mentor Hari Kirin for guiding me to a new level of depth with my art & yoga practice. She is a fantastic painter, yogi, teacher, healer who wrote the book “Art & Yoga”.
BG: When you describe what you do you mention Art + Yoga almost as a different category – is it? Do you think of it as separate from the rest of your art making, or as a practice that informs the rest of your work?
EKE: Great question, it started as separate. I saw it as a way to clear the noise and tune myself in creatively, to explore the unknown. A place that was not to be seen by anyone else. My work from observation started to show up, like memories of subjects I had recently painted on location would meander onto the page in a gesture or shape. I started using meditations for visual perception and intuition with the intention of listening to and looking for what the land, the natural world wanted to communicate. Using art as attention to witness. The same spirit of curiosity, looking and listening runs through the archeology. Imagery inspired by archeological digs and the ideas we are gathering about how life was for the ancients started to flow after meditating. So, I am finding all the strands weaving together, informing each other.
BG: You mentioned that you've been working with an archeological project in Cape Porpoise and that you're learning technical drawing as part of this. Can you tell me a bit more about that? How is the technical drawing different? How does one learn how to do that? I imagine it comes easy to you after years of drawing, but the drawings look so perfect.
EKE: Yes! This is another phenomenal thing that happened. The natural magic of life amazes me. The islands that I paint on are part of the Kennebunkport Conservation Trust. The trust land borders my family property. All my life being in this place I’ve wondered about who lived here before, what was the cultural and geological history. So, I was out there painting last summer and ran into the lead archeologist and was invited to volunteer 3 days later at the excavation of 700-year-old dugout canoe from the mudflats in front of my family cottage. Crazy, right? We had been walking over this thing for generations! Everything clicked and I have been working with CPAA (Cape Porpoise Archeological Alliance) ever since. Having accurate technical drawings in addition to photos is an important part of the archeological record. The team showed me basic drawing conventions and I worked up a scale drawing using rulers and grids. It’s a lot of looking and measuring, once you get a basic schematic you get into a rhythm. The thing is, this canoe is very complex. It is deteriorated, cracked into pieces full of worm holes. So CPAA set up a workshop with Sue Osgood, an expert epigraphic recorder who has been documenting the temple and tombs of Egypt, to work with us to innovate a method for drawing the canoe. This project is in the works. The team has pointed me to conventions for drawing stone tools and artifacts which I’m working with now. I love the discipline of it and am grateful for the in-depth study of these artifacts and what they can tell us about who was here before us.
BG: What is a typical day in the studio for you? Do you have any routines? Do you have favorite tools or music that you listen to?
EKE: Celery juice, morning practice, yoga, meditation, writing. It is key for me to take care of myself and have a service component to my day, to tend to home, to relationships, and to get out in nature. A friend of mine said “The rocks you are painting love to have you witness them”, I feel this as an energy exchange. So, I’m always intent on clearing things that block my spiritual sense and developing my ability to witness. I listen to a lot of mantra, beats, rhythms, and even medieval music like Hildegard of Bingen. I have a playlist for my Rocks & Sea series, the other day I could not get enough of whale sounds. Some of my music reaches into the ancientness of the rocks and the fluidity of the water. Sound carries a healing vibration, so I’m immersing myself in a vibrational soundtrack of the intertidal. My secret hope is that there is a healing going on with the “gazing”, the attentional and imaginative immersion in the intertidal. It feels like a love affair. When I give myself over to it, I feel the reciprocity and sense of wonder. As for a routine, my perfect workday is art and yoga in the early morning, studio painting after that, a great walk in the afternoon with some archeological drawing, and study before dinner. When I’m working outside, I plan around the weather, the light and the tide cycle. If the light is right at high tide, I take a kayak, if it’s low tide I’ll need my big old boots. I am out there a few days a week, sometimes walking, sketching or taking photos and then going back to the studio to paint.
BG: Are there other creatives, painters, writers, thinkers, that you look to for inspiration?
EKE: I have always loved painters like Joan Mitchell, Richard Diebenkorn, Willem de Kooning, Manuel Neri, Elizabeth Cummings, and Cecily Brown, for their gesture, muscle, and surface. I look at many of the Perceptual Painters of the Hawthorne lineage for their value and shape flow, paint application, and soul. I also love drawing. I’m thinking of Jenny Saville’s big drawing of 2 reclining figures that I saw recently at the Broad, and some of Ginny Grayson’s head studies, and of Jacopo Pontormo’s work. Hilma af Klint really got me and I like looking at strange medieval painting, Outsider Art, and dreamy work like Kyle Staver. I’m inspired by Mark Bradford’s epic work and I follow a lot of contemporary painters like Terry Ekasala, Galen Cheney, Jennifer Pochinsky, and Daniel Crews Chubb.
BG: Do you have any shows coming up? Where can folks find your work?
EKE: The best place to see what’s happening is on Instagram: @elizabethkelleyerickson and my yoga art feed @heartseyeart. Right now I have a solo show of yoga art at Positive Works Studio in Amesbury, Massachusetts (by appointment only, email me at capeporpoiseme@hotmail.com), I have 3 small collages in the Nano: A Tiny Art Exhibition at Engine in Biddeford, Maine through March 22, 2020, and I’m excited that the beginning of my Rocks & Sea series is up at Frank Brockman Gallery in Brunswick, Maine opening March 7, 2020.
Thanks so much Elizabeth! If you’re interested in seeing what the intertidal zone in Cape Porpoise looks like, you can see it at sunrise in September here, and find more Studio Visit posts.
All photography by me, Becca Grady.