"Always Rough Terrain" - Bright Multicolor Abstract by Marc Ellen Hamel

Description

Bright abstract painting titled "Always Rough Terrain" from the "Traveling Series" by Marc Ellen Hamel (American, b. 1948). Presented in … more Bright abstract painting titled "Always Rough Terrain" from the "Traveling Series" by Marc Ellen Hamel (American, b. 1948). Presented in a black wood frame. Titled "Always Rough Terrain" and signed "Marc Ellen Hamel" on verso.


Marc Ellen Hamel works as an abstract painter, printmaker (monotype and Print Gocco). Her art involves the interaction of color, the physical feel and look of paint, and working in an intuitive creative process developing a work by going back and forth between the immediate physicality of the process and her own subconscious place-memory. Traveling Series:
"The process of painting brings recollection; often I am carried back to another time and looking at it again. When traveling, you glimpse other places out the window; sometimes a lighted barn window slips by at night; or you stare at a new kind of territory for many miles; your eye catches the landscape’s composition and its colors. You can dream into other towns and lives…. Could be folks you are passing; could be the lives you might yet live (or might have lived). These glimpses stay with me and reappear in my mind while I am applying paint to the canvas. I find myself creating a landscape that hearkens back and hearkens forward. And of course we are all travelling through years as well as places."
Marc Ellen attended the University of Washington and is widely exhibited and has also been involved in the arts community through teaching, volunteering and memberships. She was on the Board of Directors of Shipyard Trust for the Arts (S.T.A.R.) for several years (including being Board President). Shipyard Trust for the Arts is one of the groups that has worked very hard to ensure the survival of the community of arts professionals at Hunters Point Shipyard.

Artists statement: " I studied art for a few years at the University of Washington and since then have taken art classes or workshops at various venues. I renewed my focus on art in the early 80's and became serious about painting (I had to overcome the fear that Francis Celentano had struck in my heart years before!) I found a mentor in artist/teacher Michael Cookinham at the DeYoung Museum Art School and continued critique sessions with his MICA group for 10 years thereafter. He showed us how to look at painting-our own and others- and to think about what is happening on the canvas. Since then, I have found my greatest teacher to be uncharted time working alone in the studio, analyzing what I've done, reflecting, then back to work. Friendships with fellow artists have also been instrumental in my growth, with special thanks to Joan Stuart Ross.

My studio is located at the Hunters Point Shipyard in San Francisco. This plain, rough, quiet, industrial area is perfect for the art process. Here I can focus, sink in to that level of consciousness just below the daily surface, become absorbed in painting, and receive the revelations and the beauty, that it offers. Open Studio is held at Hunters Point Shipyard twice a year, the first weekend in May and the last weekend in October." less