Ella Watson
About the Artist
Ella Watson is an artist and curator living in Bozeman, MT. In 2006, she graduated from Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond VA, with two BFA’s: one in Painting & Printmaking and the other in Sculpture & Extended Media. It was in her sophomore year that she discovered cold wax and the versatile potential of the medium enthralled her. Ella has spent the past 20 years experimenting with cold wax, discovering new, innovative ways to use the medium to create a variety of effects.
In 2007, Ella became incredibly sick and needed a liver transplant. After two years of narcotics, excruciating pain, and medical interventions, Ella’s sister saved her life by donating half of her liver during a liver-donor liver transplant. This has had a profound impact on Ella’s art: much of her recent work unpacks her medical trauma. Through her paintings and Social Practice pieces, Ella investigates the repercussions of ableism and how American society fails to respectfully recognize those coping with chronic medical conditions. Other times, Ella finds inspiration in the geology of the mountain West, mimicking the Earth’s processes in her treatment of cold wax.
Ella is currently a screen-printing assistant at Printability in Bozeman and the secretary of the board for SLAM, a local non-profit that supports Montana creatives. Most recently, she is a proud recipient of an ARPA Grant from the Montana Arts Council. Her work has been shown in NYC, Virginia, Missoula, and China, with commissions in the US, Vancouver, and Australia.
Artist Statement
To create my cold wax pieces, I first slather my canvases in successive layers of oil paint mixed with cold wax. I build my surfaces until they are at least 1/4 inch thick with at least five layers of tinted wax or until I have forgotten the colors of the layers or their order. Using clay ribbon tools, I gouge at the layered wax to reveal a kaleidoscope of hues in a wonderful moment of discovery. From there I add and subtract tinted wax until the piece finds its final form.
While my work is process-oriented, I often delve into my history as an orphan, mother, and liver-donor liver transplant recipient for concepts and motivation. I reference storytelling, Earth’s formation processes, surgeries, and physical trauma through this additive and subtractive process, while my palette is taken from the Montana wilderness. The treatment of the wax relates to both my medical trauma and the formation of the Earth. Gouging can be the removal of an organ or scar tissue, or it can be a river slicing through the terrain. Thin washes polished into the surface can mimic erosion or craniosacral massage. Adding wax can be akin to a healing wound or ro sediment on a river’s shores. I am sometimes a surgeon of the canvas making sense of what has been done to my body, searching for a complete form of myself and the painting.
I focus on the relationship between devastation and growth: living in the Rockies it is hard not to see the paradox of how cataclysmic, tectonic events have created this awesome terrain. I am equally enamored by this same relationship to traumatic events within one’s life and how those events inform a person’s character. By gouging, wiping, and stripping away layers of the wax, I emulate destruction to find form, just as we search for meaning after a tragedy. It is not uncommon for my pieces to have humorous, irreverent titles that mock the impotence of destruction to truly annihilate beauty, resourcefulness, perseverance, and adaptation.