Francis Hamel

Marc Ellen Hamel works as an abstract painter, printmaker (monotype and Print Gocco). Her art involves the interaction of color, the physical look and the feel of paint and working in an intuitive creative process developing work by going back and forth between the immediate physicality of the process and her subconscious place-memory. She feels that “the process of painting brings recollection; often I am carried back to another time and looking at it again. When traveling, you glimpse other places out the window, sometimes a lighted barn window slips by at night or you stare at a new kind of territory for many miles. Your eye catches the landscape’s composition and its colors. You can dream into other towns and lives . . . Could be folks you are passing, could be the lives you might yet live (or might have lived). These glimpses stay with me and reappear in my mind while I am applying paint to the canvas. I find myself creating a landscape that hearkens back and hearkens forward. And of course we are all traveling through years as well as places.”

Marc Ellen attended the University of Washington, is widely exhibited and has also been involved in the arts community through teaching, volunteering and memberships. She was on the Board of Directors of Shipyard Trust for the Arts (S.T.A.R.) for several years (including being Board President). She stated, “I studied art for a few years at the University of Washington and since then have taken art classes or workshops at various venues. I renewed my focus on art in the early '80s and became serious about painting (I had to overcome the fear that Francis Celentano had struck in my heart years before!). I found a mentor in artist/teacher Michael Cookinham at the DeYoung Museum Art School and continued critique sessions with his MICA group for 10 years thereafter. He showed us how to look at painting — our own and others' — and to think about what is happening on the canvas. Since then, I have found my greatest teacher to be uncharted time working alone in the studio, analyzing what I've done, reflecting, then back to work. Friendships with fellow artists have also been instrumental in my growth, with special thanks to Joan Stuart Ross. My studio is located at the Hunters Point Shipyard in San Francisco. This plain, rough, quiet industrial area is perfect for the art process. Here I can focus, sink in to that level of consciousness just below the daily surface, become absorbed in painting, and receive the revelations and the beauty that it offers. Open Studio is held at Hunters Point Shipyard twice a year, the first weekend in May and the last weekend in October.”

Bring audacious experiments with color and textures to your living room, dining room or home office. Abstract paintings, large or small, will stand out in your space, encouraging conversation and introducing a museum-like atmosphere that’s welcoming and conducive to creating memorable gatherings.

Abstract art has origins in 19th-century Europe, but it came into its own as a significant movement during the 20th century. Early practitioners of abstraction included Wassily Kandinsky, although painters were exploring nonfigurative art prior to the influential Russian artist’s efforts, which were inspired by music and religion. Abstract painters endeavored to create works that didn’t focus on the outside world’s conventional subjects, and even when artists depicted realistic subjects, they worked in an abstract mode to do so.

In 1940s-era New York City, a group of painters working in the abstract mode created radical work that looked to European avant-garde artists as well as to the art of ancient cultures, prioritizing improvisation, immediacy and direct personal expression. While they were never formally affiliated with one another, we know them today as Abstract Expressionists.

The male contingent of the Abstract Expressionists, which includes Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and Robert Motherwell, is frequently cited in discussing leading figures of this internationally influential postwar art movement. However, the women of Abstract Expressionism, such as Helen Frankenthaler, Lee Krasner, Joan Mitchell and others, were equally involved in the art world of the time. Sexism, family obligations and societal pressures contributed to a long history of their being overlooked, but the female Abstract Expressionists experimented vigorously, developed their own style and produced significant bodies of work.

Draw your guests into abstract oil paintings across different eras and countries of origin. On 1stDibs, you’ll find an expansive range of abstract paintings along with a guide on how to arrange your wonderful new wall art.

If you’re working with a small living space, a colorful, oversize work can create depth in a given room, but there isn’t any need to overwhelm your interior with a sprawling pièce de résistance. Colorful abstractions of any size can pop against a white wall in your living room, but if you’re working with a colored backdrop, you may wish to stick to colors that complement the decor that is already in the space. Alternatively, let your painting make a statement on its own, regardless of its surroundings, or group it, gallery-style, with other works.