Josiah Ellner Interview - Magazine TM

Full interview transcript below

Photograph by Dane Thomas

A Memory of Swans in Blue

Magazine TM Interview with Josiah Ellner

My name’s Josiah Ellner. I’m a recent graduate from SAIC. I got my MFA in painting and drawing there. Before that, I was in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where I did my undergrad and lived for a couple years working as a barista.

I work mostly in oil painting, and draw a lot of inspiration from the natural world, from my experiences being out in my environment, engaging with the environment, engaging with my memories, thinking about childhood.

My pronouns are he/him.

Painting can be such an intimidating medium because of its history, because it has such a long history, specifically oil painting. But it’s also one of the most approachable mediums. You just pick up a brush, you go to your local art store, grab some paints, and you just kinda get your surface and you just can do whatever you want. So. I like that kind of dichotomy a lot.

I lean more towards just using painting as an outlet for my imagination and creativity and being able to really like I mean create a picture of what’s going on in my head and putting that down.

From my everyday experience with my surroundings in the world and recently I’ve been finding myself pulling from anything and everything so I pull a lot from childhood memories, I pull a lot from just like internet images that I come into contact with that I find alluring.

Everything kind of begins in my sketchbook. So a lot of times I’ll be out in the world, I’ll see something or experience something, and a lot of time, this experience, it kind of recalls a memory from childhood. So it’s kind of an experience that happens in the present that recalls a memory from the past, and those moments kind of stick out to me. So I’ll take that kind of experience to the studio and then I’ll create like a couple sketches from that and then from those drawings of that idea then they become paintings.

So for drawings, I have so many sketchbooks and not all of them become paintings, but they’re kind of forever archived as a potential painting. If I ever am kind of struggling to figure out what I want to paint, sometimes I’ll just go through my archives of drawings and… those drawings in themselves, because those drawings are kind of a reflection of an experience or a moment. It’ll re-inspire or reinvigorate an idea that I had. To make a painting, for the most part, I would say there isn’t too much editing that happens. After making the drawing, then I decide “I’m gonna make a painting of that right now”.

I feel like growing up in China in such a large city, I’ve always been really obsessed with nature, the idea of nature.

In Xi’an, China.

I always watched David Attenborough nature documentaries. I was always going to parks and that was a really interesting thing for me as a child. Because it was so not present in my life. Everyday life is very different there because in Xi’an, you know, there’s more than eight million people.

We had to wear masks during the winter because it’s so polluted there and a lot of times the sky was always gray so it’s just like how I felt when I was a child. I really yearned to be somewhere greener. Somewhere more natural. So I relate to that a lot in my work now.

My childhood has definitely affected how I’m still thinking about that yearning and the desire to be somewhere greener.

I did a two-person show with Latitude Gallery in October.

There was a short period of time in grad school where I was working with a lot of blues and purples. In those couple of pieces that I made in grad school, I got some good feedback and I felt like it was really connecting with my ideas about the natural world.

Connecting the natural world to spirituality and a spiritual experience and so for my show at Latitude Gallery I wanted to dive back into that so for that two-person show I also was, you know, doing a lot of work and the color blue has always been very dear to me. I’ve always loved the color blue and it’s the color of the sky, it’s the color of water.

I remember reading somewhere online where it’s maybe the most favorite color that people love. Art history’s not really my strong suit, but in my undergrad when we were learning about certain art movements like the bridge or the blue rider they said that blue is the most spiritual color. And I don’t know, I think, I do believe that. I think blue, there’s like this depth to it. And so I it made a lot of sense for me to explore it further. Since then with my show at Latitude, the remnants of the blue are still here. I mean, I’m beginning to kind of incorporate purples and greens and yellows, but blue is definitely still lingering.

The figure is almost acting as an avatar. I personally find myself relating to the figures that I’m painting. That’s also my hope for my audience is that whoever you are, whatever body you inhabit, you can inhabit the bodies in these paintings ...

That’s something that I really love about abstraction and stylization when it comes to figuration, because for me I use that as a tool to kind of push the figures into more of this, I guess, ambiguous person.

But yeah, I see it as like a person who might embody all of humanity...

That’s something that I really love about abstraction and stylization when it comes to figuration, because for me I use that as a tool to kind of push the figures into more of this, I guess, ambiguous person.

But yeah, I see it as like a person who might embody all of humanity...

I watched (The Boy and The Heron) also recently and I’ve always been a huge Hayao Miyazaki fan.

Those movies have also been a part of my childhood. They’ve always had a special moment in my life. So he’s a pretty big influence. The animation is beautiful and also just how he chooses to, I guess, portray his worlds are really inspiring.

Yeah, the Heron was beautiful and terrifying and kind of grotesque at the same time. Yeah. It was all like the weird transformations. But yeah, in terms of transformation, that’s something that I kind of want to bring more into my work. Considering how things can change into other things and the possibilities and how that might create some sort of dream-like quality, because that’s something that I love about his movies, it’s like the dream-like quality that they have.

I’m always drawing from a very personal place and you know those stories are really important. They’re really important for the work to come into existence. Every piece is tied to me in a pretty personal way. Once it becomes a painting you know, it’s not necessarily that important for the viewer’s experience.

We all love stories, you know, and I love to tell my own stories. Within this kind of setting, like a studio visit or something where it’s a lot more personal I like to tell their stories, but I would say when it comes to, yeah, like Instagram or, you know or having openings that’s not necessary to put up.

A distinct quality is… The glow, or kind of how I like to think about light. But there’s also, you know, so many artists and, I truly do believe that there’s like nothing new under the sun where, you know, I’m finding artists all the time that I share a lot of ways of working with them where I’m like, wow, that person’s work looks very similar to mine. And for me, that’s something that I find more exciting versus like, oh, I need to change or do something that’s more different.

So I don’t necessarily think there’s something incredibly distinct that separates my work from other artists. I mean, the only thing that I can think about as distinct, is again, kind of going back to where, you know, I’m drawing from a personal narrative and personal experiences which I can rest.

Yeah, they’re unique to me. So that’s like a safe space for me as an artist to kind of like to rest in, to be like, you know, there’s a lot of people painting swans out there, but like there’s a very specific reason why I painted these swans.