Ellen Schillace

I love silence.
I have traveled through this world as a visual occupant. From the very beginning, my voice felt inaudible—for many reasons: my heritage, my place as a woman in my family, and my own struggle to reconcile words with their contradictions and failures.
Recently, I listened to Dominican writer Junot Díaz, author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, speak about how many people—especially immigrants—“miss parts of most conversations for lack of comprehension.” I recognized myself completely in that description. It was the terrain I had inhabited for so long. And in that quiet space of partial understanding, I found myself reaching toward a language both simple and universal.
My earliest images were primitive, unrefined, and utterly my own. At age eight, I drew worlds filled with people laughing, dancing, and delighting in one another—a diary of innocence. By eighteen, I turned to portraits as the realities of the world began pressing into that young, protected space.
“Art plays an unknowing game with things. Just as a child at play imitates us, so we at play imitate the forces that created and are creating the world.”
—Paul Klee
I continued drawing portraits, but I did not discover my true voice until I was twenty-nin...

Hope High School '66

Salve Regina University '71
Art
English and Psychology

EQUALIBRIUM, WOMANMADE GALLERY,CHICAGO 2014
TIANJIN CONTEMPORARY ART MUSEUM, TIANJIN,CHINA, SPRING 2014
SUSTAINABLE ACTS:MOTHER EARTH'S EMBRACE 2015
THE WOMEN AND MONEY PROJECT, 2016
Painting without paint, Dublois Gallery, Newport, Rhode Island, 2010