The work of Elllen Sherman Zinn pulses with vitality through its suggestive interplay between control and spontaneity. The inventiveness of transcendence that plays itself out so readily in her art is particularized through the ambiguities of scale, which plays an important role in apprehending sensorially the given object and its gestural components.  Artist's brushstrokes, lines and spaces create a system of signification through its obstinate conflating of the near and the far, the miniature and the gigantic, permeating artist's work with a rare quality of poetic exaltation.

There is a flourish, a tumultuousness in these large scale works. Seen from a distance artist's swirls of paint are sensuously compelling and dynamic. Coming up close to the surface of her work the viewer takes in the minutiae of imbricated picture planes and the detailed edges of her painterly strokes. The great sea-swelling of her vista-like textures assume a serenely dream-like quality. It all looks so effortless: a sign of mastery. It is a truism I suppose to say that great painting is born out of ultimate freedom as well as by necessity and will yet in the case of Ellen Sherman Zinn, her visual achievement is undeniable.

A standout is Charged (2008). It is a prototypical example of the energies that unfold in the work of Ellen Sherman Zinn. Just as Kandinsky’s “inner necessity” served as the carrier that drove this artist to produce his abstract work, the universal essence that underlies the pictorial self-sufficiency of Sherman Zinn’s work resides in her capacity to induce a certain state of internal contradiction that sustains the integrity of her work.

We see on one level the pure medium of the brushstrokes that roll and wave one upon the other.   Artist’s coloristic interplay constantly evokes a liberation of the image from a narrative or symbolic reading. It essentializes by insisting on the autonomy of the two-dimensional picture plane while evoking without gratuitousness a transcendent realm of pure expression.

What is remarkable in Sherman Zinn’s palette and mark-making capacity is its elasticity, its capacity to cleave to any number of inferences that diverge from non-objective form, while obstinantly staying within the regime of abstraction. Yet the paint material itself is hardly prescriptive at all. In fact it is hardly over-determined in any real sense. It flows and flutters, pools and eddies as naturally and spontaneously (seemingly) as imagination itself out for a stroll.

On yet another level, the artist sets up the contrasts in her gestural schema where the textures of dark brushstrokes and lines deliberately interfere to create a visual resistance to the play of infinite depth seen in the passages of color. This evokes a pictorial illusion of deep space, which is undercut by the artist's application of darker slashes of color. The result is a heightened drama of the pure “factness” of her paint materials that seem to have their own proud volition as they assert the flatness of the picture plane and the support surface as surface itself.

What we see, therefore, is much more than what we bargained for. We feel contested territory in artist’s work. Optical roller-coaster effects are held in careful balance through the sheer craftsmanship and, importantly, through judicious cropping and editing. The outer edges of her work are cadenced with exactitude and nuance allowing the spectator to enter the picture plane through multiple viewpoints. Thus, the paintings of Ellen Sherman Zinn remind us that the poetry in good abstract painting is in its infinite potential to revitalize its dialog with the viewer and to resist immediate comprehensibility through formal inventiveness.

John Austin
John Austin is a Manhattan based art critic and writer.