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A. Ellis is ... a mystery.... No one knows what the “A.” stood for or what gender it indicated. There are about 15 known A. Ellis paintings, two at upstate New York’s Fenimore Art Museum. In a YouTube video, Jonathan Fielding likens the Gilman portrait to Modigliani. The nose, angled a good 60 degrees from a perpendicular to the facial plane, is more Picasso. The too-close eyes in a too-big head is South Park. It is certainly the cartoony element that grabs the viewer. Albert G. Gilman reads as a caricature, voicing the anxieties that Yankee taciturnity leaves unsaid. (http://blogs.artinfo.com/lacmonfire/2016/10/24/becoming-america-at-the-huntington/)
The two portraits of an unknown man and woman in the Fenimore Art Museum collection, signed by A. Ellis, are among my favorites folk art paintings of all time. We know so little about the artist; no biographical data at all, in fact. About 15 likenesses are ascribed to him (or her), and all come from the Readfield-Waterville area of central Maine. Not exactly on the way to anywhere.
The data we have, of course, is the paintings themselves. Look at these two. Ellis obviously had no artistic training in how to reproduce the observed world naturalistically. No shade or shadow, no three-dimensional modeling, no realistic surface textures. Our couple is sharply retooled into flat, decorative patterns. Lou Jones, our former director, used to say that if you wanted to create paintings to teach what folk art was supposed to look like, you would have ended up with paintings like these. It seems apparently that Ellis may have been experienced in furniture or wall decoration, where patterns prevailed.... (More at http://folkartcooperstown.blogspot.nl/2010/10/brilliant-simplicity-of-ellis.html) undefined