Still (there is) life
    The drawings of Stephen Ellis

    The painstaking accumulation of large images out of tiny marks speaks to the heroic futility of attempting to repair a damaged planet.
    Stephen Ellis, 2014

    Vanity of vanities, everything is vanity.
    Ecclesiastes 1:2;12:8

    The utilitarian writing device known as the ‘ball-point pen’ is the medium used by school children in 1B4 exercise books, of crossword warriors and doodlers by the telephone, it’s the people’s most familiar mark-making tool after graphite. Stephen Ellis is an artist who has chosen the quotidian ball-point pen and correction fluid above all other showy media; there is no vanity in the humble ball-point pen, and yet Stephen Ellis’ biro and correction fluid drawings are nothing short of magnificent illusory alchemy.

    In the broad array of high art media, the 21st century boasts some of the most technologically advanced art production since the first printing press was made. Ellis’ use of the biro or ball-point pen piques my interest. I have long admired any artist that has the ability to tame the under-rated media. I first saw ball-point pens used for fine art purposes in my youth. My father was a ‘ballpointist’. He would use different coloured biros to make representations of shaded pine forests and fantastical landscapes. Using tone and cross-hatching, he achieved a degree of sensitivity with biro ink that first showed me its higher calling.

    Ellis understands this too, he knows its limitations. He understands it as a material, that it is viscous and can be quite wayward requiring a steady hand. The act of drawing, like the printmakers throughout Western art history, is a disciplined and exact art. Every line, every mark, is placed in exactness next to another to create the illusion of three dimensions. This technical mastery over this difficult and relatively unexploited media shows off Ellis’ mastery.

    Verisimilitude, vanitas, surrealism and the everyday object come together to form epic visual narratives. Ellis’ still lives of another kind.

    The still-life genre, despite modernity and every other art movement to-date, has never quite been snuffed out. Ellis isn’t actually making still-life drawings per se, he refers to them more as “dioramas”. The depicted objects are things he has physically created and employed as subjects, like fruit or vases might in a still-life vignette. Ellis considers his reconstituted objects as societal flotsam and jetsam, not purely subjects in the picture plane. What is signified here is a bigger picture; they represent pitifully small gestural attempts at fixing a world in ecological peril.

    Many semiological systems (objects, gestures, pictorial images) have a substance of expression whose essence is not to signify; often, they are objects of everyday use, used by society in a derivative way, to signify something:
    Roland Barthes
    Elements of Semiology, 1964, Publisher: Hill and Wang, 1968

    It would be easy enough to mistake the oceanic scenes as photographs of deep sea oil rigs in violent waters. Instead, they are reading lamps, Meccano constructions, tables with Meccano prosthetic legs, chairs, an ironing board, suitcases, umbrellas, a broom all being thrashed and succumbing to the might of sea. They are the dross leftover and act as reminders of the futility of things. Ellis posits these works like visual prophecies.

    While the vanitas still-life tradition depicted dead fishes, fruit and skulls and such to remind us of the vanity and brevity of life, Ellis uses familiar objects, forming a salient new iconography for a modern vanitas. Not with religious, but humanitarian affiliation. The rising waters is not so much a perceived existential and spiritual concern in Ellis’ works as it is a real, scientifically measurable phenomenon. His works do not offer a faceless god ‘out there’ warning us to be better kaitiaki (custodians) of the planet, or offering us solace. Nope, there’s just you and I left with the burden of action. Artists such as Brett Graham and Rachael Rakena address this same issue in their work Aniwaniwa with reference to the low-lying atolls in the Pacific such as Kiribati and Tuvalu which are slowly being swallowed by Tangaroa (God of the sea in Maori cosmology).

    In the work The Amount of Time Buried (2015), the mounds covered in draped fabric are juxtaposed against of mountains. The fabric lands are exquisite in their execution, Ellis has drawn the memories of each fold. These sheets cover the land like we imagine one might cover cadavers in a morgue. Gothic and Brutalist architectural structures appear like snow ploughs, another reminder of humanity’s presence in the far flung edges of the earth. Death and all her might are ever-present in these imagined scapes. Isolated, desolate and Sublime.

    Void of human life, each work is loaded with the detritus created by us. The absolute attention to chiaroscuro is breath-taking. Ellis himself states that he often uses imagery such as mountain scenery ‘verbatim’ from artists such as Caspar Friedrich, JWM Turner and Theodore Gericault. Each artist possesses the ability to capture the majesty and barbarism inherent in the elements that govern weather systems. The Amount of Time Buried conveys blistering cold in the same way that Friedrich’s work The Sea of Ice (1824) does. Ellis allows us no distraction in choosing to use only one colour. By rendering with just the biro-blue monochrome, he exploits every depth of tone he can possible get, conspiring with the picture plane to merge the real with surreal.

    These assemblage Frankensteins are Ellis’ created objects exist in reality. A table leg here, a broom there. He draws desk lamps onto the pictorial surface in Necessary Protection (2014) and The Anchor Drags (2014) to illuminate these ‘Frankensteins’ and in so doing, reviving them from the dead. The lamps don’t actually provide real light but their roles in these works light up the bleak dark. They act as beacons lit up for ‘HELP’ as well as signifiers of light in ominous times. Ellis uses the lamps as pictorial strategy to generate the trompe l’oeill, fooling us into thinking that their light is real. Here, like the work of Theodore Gericault’s Raft of the Medusa, the omnipotence of the sea is intensified by stark contrasting light.

    Ellis’ acts of drawing present very honestly, his own despair as well as his hopes for salvaging a world we have sent out to sea: desperately calling for help with the white (flag) rag waving down anyone who cares to help. All is not lost…

    Leafa Wilson
    2015