Check Out Ellen Koment’s Story

Today we’d like to introduce you to Ellen Koment.

Hi Ellen, thanks for sharing your story with us. To start, maybe you can tell our readers some of your backstories.
I have been painting all my life, and through the years, first in NYC and then In CA, and then, after a Wurlitzer Residency Grant, finally making my way to New Mexico. Painting has been my life, starting with a contest I won while at the HS of Music and Art in NYC, which put my painting on a poster in the NYC Subway, on to Cooper Union Art School, to Boston, and finally to graduate school at UC Berkeley, where the landscape, and the light, entered my life and my work.

After many shows in San Francisco, including the New Painters show at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and many at Ebert Gallery, I finally made my way to New Mexico, Santa Fe, and Colorado, where I was invited to show at the MIXX Gallery in Telluride. And now to the small historic town of Las Vegas, where light and landscape have become my inspiration. And a new gallery, Aurelia Gallery on Canyon Road, has a show now, with me and my partner, Mario Quilles, and we are amazed at how our work works together. And then, one to come. a retrospective. Since I have been painting for a very long time.

We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
Every life has obstacles, and challenges. I lost my mother when I was a child, and worked with her sister, who was an artist. I lost my late husband at a young age, and took to travel, to Egypt, to Israel, to Europe, and then back to CA, having an amazing collector, but ultimately what my life is about is painting, and it is what lifts me from those challenges, and into a world of my making.

As you know, we’re big fans of you and your work. For our readers who might not be as familiar what can you tell them about what you do?
I painted with oil and acrylic, with largely the figure, but also the landscape, until 25 years or so ago, someone gave me a chunk of wax, and at that time there was little to be known about the ancient medium of Encaustic, and so I began exploring on my own and was at the beginning of the revival of this ancient medium.

When in 2013 I won the LaVendeeme award for excellence in Encaustic Education I had taught 1000 students and continued to teach workshops until very recently. And then in 2011, I had my first show of what began to be called “Paper Pours”, pouring hot wax onto flexible paper, so that your presence in the process is always required. They were, and are, a new song to sing. But encaustic on panels is also something that has emerged.

Can you tell us more about what you were like growing up?
Well, my earliest memories were living a half block from the beach in Coney Island, which made me realize that life could be fun, and that life was unpredictable. We went on to Philadelphia, and then to Ohio, where my Mother died when I was eleven.

Then back to NYC, the Bronx, where my father and I lived with his father, in a small and amazing street called Fox Terrace, A street almost entirely inhabited by Europeans each with a tiny house, with a fruit tree in the front. And during those years my mother’s sister, Marcia Sheer, and my Uncle Ben, both artists, became a big influence on my life. We stayed there for five years until my Father remarried and we moved to the Lower East Side.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.ellenkomentart.com
• Instagram: @ellenkomentstudio
• Facebook: @ellenkoment or @ellenkomentpaintings
• Youtube: @ellenkoment encaustic part 1&2 @EllenKoment ARtsThrive at the ABQ Museum