Marc Ellen Hamel Paintings

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.”