Hunters Point Open Studios (1998).
About Carolyn
The art of Carolyn Ellingson features vivid color and abstract shapes with flowing swirls, and clean straight lines. It’s a style that developed over a long personal history that was not at all a straight-line progression.
Carolyn was born in Chicago and raised in Minneapolis by parents who both had art school degrees. Her father worked for many years as a commercial artist. The parents warned their children: “Don’t become an artist – there’s no money in it”, her brother remembers. It took decades, but Carolyn would eventually disregard the advice.
But first she raised a family, including foster children, as a housewife in suburban Minneapolis. It seemed like a perfectly normal life, but with little outlet for expressing or nurturing her own emerging artistic creativity. And a health crisis was exploding in her head in the 1970s. Following a series of extremely odd behavior, Ellingson was hospitalized in a psychiatric ward where, among other therapies, she endured shock treatments - against her will. She spoke of those dark days (which she referred to, not as a mental breakdown, but as her “break-through”) in an interview in the now-defunct web magazine Feminista. She hired a lawyer and, with help from some incredibly caring friends, extracted herself from the hospital treatments and marriage, and then left domestic life behind to set off on her own.
Ellingson earned a master’s degree in public health from the University of Minnesota in 1982 and moved to San Francisco in 1983. She was joyful about living in a new, exciting, cosmopolitan city, but didn’t find opportunities to employ her public health degree there. She lived in a small apartment on a ridiculously steep street and worked secretarial jobs to put food on the table, while taking art classes and producing her own artwork at community studios in the evenings. Eventually, the lure of becoming a full-time artist overwhelmed her and she opened a studio at San Francisco’s Hunter's Point, a former navy shipyard.
Ellingson hit her artistic stride in San Francisco and produced an enormous number of oil, acrylic, and watercolor paintings, monotype and intaglio prints, and pastels in the final two decades of her life. In the Feminista article Carolyn said: “I know I create way too much art for how much I am able to sell. I often wonder what this is all about. It just keeps pouring out”. Fortunately, she photographed nearly every art piece she made, whether sold or unsold. She also embraced new communications technology, such as the Internet and e-mail, and was an “early adopter” among artists, designing her own website to display her work and using eBay auctions to sell some pieces.
Carolyn’s creative outpouring was ended by mesothelioma, a rare form of lung cancer caused by asbestos exposure, which led to her untimely death in 2002 at the age of 64; her obituary can be read here. Her sons have continued and enhanced her website, www.artgroove.com, which features almost 2000 digitized images of her work – images that she preserved with her camera. Carolyn's artist CV (as she wrote it) can be read here.
[Credit to Carolyn's brother Brooks Martner for this write-up.]
Carolyn's June 1997 interview in Feminista!
Carolyn was interviewed by the now-defunct webzine, "Feminista!" in 1997, and spoke about how she became an artist in spite of all the challenges she faced coming from being a stay-at-home mother of the '60s. The article was published with numerous images of Carolyn's art and was titled, "Pick up the brush, the chalk, the clay".
Carolyn had this to say about the interview: "I never considered myself a feminist per se, but perhaps I am after all-- read this interview and decide for yourself. I believe every woman has at least a few feminist stories in her life repertoire. The interview conducted by Leigh Anne Jones reveals what I feel it's like to be an artist here in San Francisco, and what I thinks it takes for anyone to be an artist."
The Feminista! website is down, but the interview can be found here. It is several pages long, but if you're interested in Carolyn's art or personal background, it's not to be missed.
Special Projects
crashA special exhibition in memory of Bill Bateman who died February 20, 1997 at age 49 after being hit by a car in Oakland, California, USA. The special exhibit uses captions from "Crash," the book by J. G. Ballard. Ballard wrote "Crash" in 1973 and it was recently made into a movie directed by David Cronenberg who also did Scanners, The Fly, and Naked Lunch. The movie is a study in the modern search for intensity, eschews morality and breaks the boundaries of "normal." Ballard forsees our coming "autogeddon."
World Trade Center Art ProjectCarolyn was moved to create a series of watercolors in response to the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on New York City.