Ellie Young

Afters @ Gallery TEN

As a, primarily, figurative painter I’ve always been interested in the interaction between the subject of a painting and its surface. I create ways that the surface intrudes upon the image depicted, or forces the decisions in the painting based on the nature of the material rather than its subject. The haphazard nature of my modelling and materials tends to give everything a comical quality.
I like taking an image that is vaunted as a masterpiece and maybe demystifying or humbling it somehow. I kept looking at Italian masterpieces from the renaissance, some a bit earlier and later - mostly from postcards I had in the studio. They all contain narrative around the Greek gods and Ovid’s Metamorphosis or Bible stories. The ubiquitousness of these images and stories render extraordinary, often violent scenes seem benign or at least palatable.

Braeval Street (Made in Roath) Residency 2019

Made in Roath kindly offered me a garage space to make a some new big work - I painted these big hands.

Studio Wall 2019

Still painting on cardboard my preoccupations for 2019 were ripped jeans, Jodie Foster and floating heads,

SHIFT residency 2019 (Big Daphne)

The Pity

Made over 2 days on site in St Martin’s Church in Roath as part of Made in Roath Festival 2018. Mary Magdalene based on a sculpture of La Pieta by Niccolò dell’Arca that is in Bologna. These 9 ft tall paintings are acrylic and pencil on cardboard.

Unit(e) 2018

Summer residency programme at g39 in Cardiff. This is work I made in g39 over the summer, whilst in residence with a group of artists in the gallery space. All work pictured is acrylic paint on cardboard.

Moving Women 2017

Series of 50 triple portraits of Women in a moment of emotional expression. First exhibited as part of Changing Faces at Oriel Mwldan. The faces are drawn from films, each expression broken down into 3 distinct parts in an attempt to portray a fleeting moment in a single static image.