Catalogue Introduction
Mary Anne Aytoun Ellis' highly distinctive paintings are both subtle and seductive. Her personal lexicon of subjects and motifs is a vital product of her life experiences; with their muted greys and sepias, her paintings could perhaps only have been made in and of England.
Two of her relatives have ben particularly strong influences on Aytoun Ellis. The artist was brought up by her maternal grandmother, a farmer's daughter who passed on her deep love and knowledge of the natural world, and these formative childhood experiences are key to Aytoun Ellis' outlook and art. Her botanical knowledge is impressive - she knows her onions (a keen gardener, she can grow exhibition grade ones too - a perfect foil to long hours spent in intense concentration in the studio). She is also very aware of the legacy of her great-great-grandfather, Frederick Jones. In tribute, his portrait hangs over her desk. A multi-talented polymath, he was at various times a schoolmaster, architect, antiquarian, carpenter and wood reeve, managing the woodland on the local estate. His beautifully observed botanical studies testify to his artistic prowess: the delicate, emotive touch is alive in Aytoun Ellis' hand and eye.
For decades the contemporary visual arts have necessarily ben urban-centred, the Modern Movement being directed from the fine art capitals of New York and London. Rural concerns have therefore been profoundly unfashionable. In this respect Aytoun Ellis has been swimming against the tide, though she has never been swimming alone. Global anxiety for the stability of our environment is now a strong political, social and cultural force of the younger generations. Issues of the day must always be expressed through the visual arts and a revival of Neo-Romantic ideas is already prevalent on a broad front. Such ideas together with a sense of melancholia resonate perfectly with the paintings of Aytoun Ellis.
Unconventional art practice can produce very interesting and unusual visual results. Aytoun Ellis has developed her unique and complex practice over many years. No doubt it will continue to change, since she is never content to repeat previous success. Through etching on to absorbent plaster grounds and experimenting with thin colour washes she discovered that the matt and translucent qualities of egg tempera achieved the look she was after. By experimentation and accident, she discovered a host of techniques to add to her alchemy - for example, she adds gesso to her preferred paper support, for texture and body, and later distorts and cracks the surface with a heat gun.
Working plein-air and in the studio, Aytoun Ellis often begins work on a small piece of paper and then adds more pieces as the composition fans out in all directions. She works on as many as fifteen paintings at any one time and may continue to work on a piece for several years. Connections between works in mark-making and narrative, continuity and tempo are crucial to progress, and this requires lots of studio time. Since Aytoun Ellis is spinning plates, occasionally one will crash and be left until a new angle is found or the work can be recycled. She refers to the constant need for re-editing and transformation; she works the surface repeatedly and alternately with abrasion and deft touch, knocking-back (her phrase) too prominent and unwanted elements and adding veil after veil of thin wash to create her physical version of atmosphere. Making art is an activity that shifts one away from the contingencies of the everyday world into a place where formal decisions can be agonised over, reviewed and refined endlessly. What is depicted in the works is inextricably intertwined with how it is depicted.
The principle subjects of this exhibition are trees and water, themes which have endured throughout Aytoun Ellis' career, but which have recently found a new focus with the poet Clare Best for Springlines, a collaborative project exploring hidden and mysterious water sources across the South Country of England. The linear nature and spatial complexity of trees are a constant lure, especially in winter mantle, and Aytoun Ellis' signature hilltop and wind-swept copses appear as ancestral tribes who might possess a brooding power over the present. Though she expresses fear of bodies of water, their hiding and revealing potential and life-force significance make them irresistible subjects. The paintings (usually devoid of human presence, or even buildings) are often populated with animals - dogs, birds and especially deer hold a fascination through literary and mythological affinity. Eschewing sentiment, the artist renders these animals in haunting clarity, giving an almost other-worldiness to their presence. The essence of Aytoun Ellis' art is her ability to find the spot-on balance between the intense and very fine draughtsmanship with ink or graphite, and serendipity of surface and supporting layers of paint. Precise observation is in perfect counterpoint with the happy vagaries of chance.
Artists need to relate in some way to art history. Aytoun Ellis understandably admires the northern Renaissance painters such as Durer and Memling. Interestingly she was advised against writing her college dissertation on Paul Nash and chose David Bomberg instead. Nash of course would have been the correct choice for her - he was the link between the great British Romantic tradition of Turner and Constable, and the Modern Movement, and is a pivotal figure of the 20th century. War artist, Constructivist, Surrealist and Neo-Romantic, Nash famously professed that he loved and worshipped trees and believed them to be people. His notion of Genius Loci, the pervading hidden spirit of a place, chimes with Aytoun Ellis' own love and knowledge of her many chosen corners of the Sussex Downs, most within bicycling distance of home. Aytoun Ellis' interest in the aesthetics of English landscape has of course many famous precedents such as Thomas Gainsborough, William Blake, Samuel Palmer and later Graham Sutherland, Ben Nicholson, John Piper, Ivon Hitchens and Peter Lanyon.
Aytoun Ellis finds emotive landscapes that inspire her to use pencil and paint in formally inventive and arresting ways to take us to places that are Elysian and loaded with nostalgia. She builds on a long tradition which continues to speak to us today as people who, though now largely urbanised, remain perpetually fascinated by representations of landscape.
Tim Craven, Curator of Art, Southampton City Art Gallery