Watercolors came naturally to artist James Ellis.
“The summer I finished elementary school I discovered my mom was taking a watercolor painting class,” he remembers. “I watched her arrange her palette and paints, ready her favorite brushes, set up a tiny watercolor board on a tiny easel, and then paint that morning’s model, a small white vase decorated with a blue printed illustration of a Chinese farmer. The vase held a few black-eyed Susans. My mom worked quickly, and in less than an hour she produced an exquisite rendering. My mom had suddenly transformed from an ordinary person into a kind of alchemist, magician, or muse. I knew I wanted to be an artist too. “
Ellis further recalls as a child drawing cartoons and caricatures, designing his own versions of Archie comics, and drawing portraits of famous people from Encyclopaedia Britannica biographies.
He became interested in the crisp watercolors of Harry Wingfield and Martin Aitchison. Over time, he found great British illustrators, like Beatrix Potter and E.H. Shepard. “I also developed a passion, bordering on mania, for the irreverent style of Mad and Cracked magazines, which, as a teen, led me onward to concert posters and album illustrations produced by Stanley Mouse, Alton Kelley, and Rick Griffin,” he says. “I admired their original works at The Psychedelic Shop in San Francisco, when I moved there at the end of my teens. I was inspired to create my own hard-edged abstract patterns and designs.”
His family moved seven times around Texas and Louisiana before Ellis was eighteen years old. The majority of those years were spent in Austin and Houston, Texas.
In the late 1980s and ‘90s, Ellis traveled to Europe where he discovered the works of Bellini and Dürer, Rembrandt and Vermeer, Degas and Renoir, Picasso and Chagall. When he’d depleted his resources, he enrolled at the University of Houston, and earned a joint-degree in studio art and art history. He then began graduate studies at Rice University, working toward an MA in art history, followed by a PhD in art history in the Case Western Reserve University-Cleveland Museum of Art joint program. His Master’s thesis was on the Sunday Paintings of Ben Shahn, and his PhD dissertation focused on the urban realism of The Fourteenth Street School artists who shared his interest in social realism.
Ellis also served as an assistant to the Cleveland Museum’s Curator of American Paintings for a few years and went on to teach at Cleveland State University. From 2012-2019 he taught at the City University of Hong Kong and at Hong Kong Baptist University’s Academy of Visual Arts.
Like most children, says Ellis, he started off drawing with pencils, crayons, and colored pencils. But when he began learning more technique, he adopted a predominantly dry-on-dry and/or a fairly-wet-on-dry method, with ever smaller brushes, which made watercolor painting more fun and satisfying. He also paints in oils.
Ellis began to experiment in various new media – photography, etching and drypoint, oil painting and pastel, woodcarving and whittling, balsa- and basswood modeling, and stained-glass. At university, he produced a few massive self-portraits (6×8 feet) in the manner of Chuck Close. Since then, he’s generally worked in smaller, even miniaturist drawings and paintings measuring little more than 3×5 inches.
“There is a tendency in my practice to pay attention to even the most minute detail, and using a miniature scale ensures I will eventually finish a work!” he says.
His admiration of other artists includes the structural integrity and endless interactions of patchwork passage in Paul Cézanne’s Mont Sainte-Victoire images; Winslow Homer’s watercolors of Cullercoats, the Adirondacks, and the Atlantic coastline, and his absolutely fearless technique. Edward Hopper’s light and clarity, especially in his images of lighthouses and the Victorian architecture of New England. The decorative patterning of Maurice Prendergast and the French Neo-Impressionist Paul Signac. The flatness of Ukiyo-e woodcut prints and Mary Cassat’s personalized the Japanese aesthetic. Reginald Marsh’s portrayal of mundane city life, sometimes ugly, sometimes beautiful, often transcendent, and Isabel Bishop’s tiny etchings of office girls chatting in the park.
“In my paintings and drawings,” says Ellis, “I try to convey a sense of place either by interpreting the landscape or through observations of men and women interacting in social environments. This draws me to non-traditional art space, outside the conventional gallery model.”
Now, Ellis notes, he keeps returning to similar themes and locations, often drawing and painting Hong Kong’s street markets. “You see people doing their daily shopping. Butchers in the open-air carve pieces of raw meat, cooked ducks hang from hooks dripping on the pavement, piles of brightly-hued fruit and vegetables, and jars of herbs and mushrooms, dried fish, etc., from all around East Asia,” he says.
For many years, Ellis also returned to certain spots in Taiwan where he has family. “I often visit Cijin Island, along the Taiwanese port city of Kaohsiung, and try to capture the place through its characteristic land/seascape, idiosyncratic architecture, and touristy shops. I like the odd little side streets and more humble dwellings,” he says. “And in Kaohsiung itself, I enjoy sketching and painting people visiting art galleries or cultural centers, or sitting at tables outside tea shops. I live alongside Old Peak Road in Hong Kong Island’s Midlevel district with its beautiful flora and fauna, and vistas that inspire Hongkongers and visitors alike.”
Ellis has lived in Hong Kong for some thirteen years. “During that time the city has gone through major changes, especially since 2019 with the pro-democracy demonstrations, the crackdown, and the COVID-era quarantines. People continue with their ordinary day-to-day activities, outwardly unaffected by the passing times. I’ve found a quality of persistence, perseverance, and resilience in Hongkongers that is fascinating and appealing.
“Life in Hong Kong is relentless; there’s an unceasing intensity. Hong Kong’s among the most crowded places on earth, but the crowded parts are encircled by a lovely setting, with surrounding islands, rugged coastlines, jagged hills and mountains, and lush rainforest,” he continues. “And then there’s Indian Rubber trees, Orchid trees, Camphor and Cinnamon trees, Weeping Willows, and bamboo groves, populated by an odd melange of pangolin, wild boars, Malaya porcupines, bats, and every imaginable insect.”
Ellis sometimes begins and ends a work on location in a single sitting. This works best, he says, when doing landscapes or studies from nature, when you need a stable subject to capture the details. When portraying people in urban settings, he often visits the same place many times, doing a series of small preparatory drawings to capture the overall location in one, architecture in others, and various picturesque details to enliven the scene in others.
For his watercolors, he employs a dry-on-dry method, and uses tiny 00 or 0 size round (pointed) brushes, basically drawing in paint. He begins most watercolors with an underlying preparatory drawing. This allows him ample freedom during the painting process for multiple wet-on-dry and wet-on-wet passages and free creative interplay of descriptive and non-descriptive layering of color.
“I have sort of an old-fashioned notion of drawing and painting,” says Ellis, ”in that I tend to favor depicting things relatively accurately and with a degree of objectivity. And I really believe the true character and talent of an artist is revealed through skillful manual manipulation of tools and media. I share the attitudes of realists like Homer, or Hopper, or even Courbet, who said, ‘painting is essentially a concrete art and must be applied to real and existing things.’
“However, I have a lot of difficulty slavishly copying nature, or sticking to the natural palette of earth tones, especially when portraying artificial man-made environments in cities. The common watercolor or gouache palette often contains hues that are much brighter and livelier than even a city like Hong Kong. So, I find myself wandering off on chromatic flights of fancy like the German Expressionist Ernst Ludwig Kirchner or the French Fauvist Andre Derain, whom I really admire.”
Ellis adds that studying the French early modernist evolution from Realism, into Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, and into Fauvism, strongly affected his artistic outlook – naturalism giving way to more expressive use of pure color and decorative effects. “When I taught at Hong Kong Baptist University’s Academy of Visual Arts, many of the Hong Kong and mainland Chinese art students were enthralled with conceptual art. Still, in my heart,” he says, “I’m committed to working with traditional materials and producing hopefully unique and enjoyable finished products.”
Share this post with your friends.
