Although raised in a strict Southern Baptist home, Sharon Ellis mistrusts organized religion. Rather than participate in church observances, she expresses her spiritual self by painting visionary psychedelic landscapes, a now common genre that she helped legitimize in the 1990s. A nature lover, Ellis lived for many years in the Silver Lake neighborhood of Los Angeles before moving to Yucca Valley where, in recent years, she has spent much of her time communing with the expansive land and skies of the desert. Working with the discipline and patience of the monks who painstakingly created medieval manuscript illuminations, Ellis continues her time-consuming practice of building each composition by applying up to 60 layers of alkyd paint, which produces smooth, pristine surfaces that lend a magical quality to her imagery. In her new exhibition of works on paper, she takes on a timely topic by contrasting weather temperaments. Not unsurprisingly, most of the recent paintings call attention to the aberrant and incongruous atmospheric conditions that plague our current times.

The artist addresses the perils of climate change by focusing on environmental phenomena that can be either life sustaining or threatening, such as flash flooding and extreme heat. In Messenger (2016), a tree formation constructed of raindrops and embellished with pearlescent strands of electric lights appears under a rainbow shaped like a protective dome, conveying the idea that water is a precious and scarce resource in the desert, especially with droughts having becoming more frequent. A preponderance of raindrops, accompanied by charged lightning bolts, also fills the composition of Dark Summer Day (2022), where the rain drenches and gives life to a coniferous tree. The nurturing potential of the mostly white droplets is compromised in the foreground by a streaming downpour of black, presumably polluted drops. 

Sharon Ellis, Mojave Night, 2022, alkyd on paper, 16.5 x 20.5 in. Courtesy of Kohn Gallery.

Severe cold is at play in the predominantly blue Mojave Night (2022), while extreme heat is the subject of the mostly orange and yellow Summer Heat (2022). In both, artificial looking rocky terrains sprout black barren trees. Yet, while these scenes acknowledge the desolation caused by climate abnormalities, Ellis infuses them with spiritual connotations and a hopeful optimism by filling the skies with miraculous occurrences. A gust of sparkling stars rises up like a swarm of fireflies in Mojave Night, while a spectacular vista of blazing suns spinning like disks brings an aesthetically healing energy to Summer Heat. 

Ellis goes a step further in bringing spiritual meaning to her imagery in Desert Willow Evening (2022). With its altar-like configuration of trees and a celestial body at the helm, the painting replicates the structure of a calendar page from a medieval book of hours.