Barges, Tugs and Tankers
Oil on panel, 12" x 18", 2020
Artist: Ellen Kozak

I grew up near water, learning to swim at an early age in the nearby Long Island Sound and on family vacations in Maine. Since 1994 I've had a studio on the Hudson River in Greene County. Painting on a field easel at the river's edge puts me in close physical contact with my surroundings.

While the Hudson and other bodies of water are my subject, I also depend upon them to perform a practical role. I use a river's reflective surface as a giant watery lens, an intermediary device for indirectly observing the world above. Like a lens, the surface of a river can assimilate reflection, color, and pattern. It collects activity from the sky above, the movements of clouds, fog, foliage, planes in flight, and on the Hudson, barges that transport hazardous material.

In recent years, the escalation in commercial traffic on the Hudson is overwhelming as the river is reindustrialized. Ironically, from my studio, the passing barges, tugs, and tankers are particularly stunning at night when the reflected lights from these vessels illuminate the river. The drama of these nighttime scenes in combination with moonlight and atmospheric conditions inspired me to begin a series of night paintings in March 2020 when the Covid lockdown kept us in place. There are now more than thirty paintings in my series. Most of these are in my current solo exhibition, Vigil: New Paintings, at the David Richard Gallery in NYC from November 27 - December 23, 2021.

This painting is one of the first that I painted. While my paintings offer neither views nor realistic representation of elements in the landscape, I hope that the authority and experience of close observation and empirical practice is evident and tangible.

Ellen Kozak was born in Queens in 1955 and received her Master of Science in Visual Studies from MIT's, Center for Advanced Visual Studies, where after graduation she continued as a Center Fellow. She received her BFA from the Massachusetts College of Art. Between the years 1982 and 1984 Kozak worked in Japan and studied shod? (traditional Japanese calligraphy).

Ellen has had twenty solo exhibitions in galleries and museums in the US and abroad including the Hudson River Museum, Katonah Museum of Art, Osaka Contemporary Art Center, Osaka, Japan, Tochigi Prefectural Museum of Art, Japan, Elizabeth Harris and Katarina Rich Perlow Galleries in NYC, Cross Contemporary Art in Saugerties, NY. She has participated in group shows held at the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art; Sylvia Wald and Po Kim Gallery, NYC; ODETTA Gallery, Brooklyn; Thompson Giroux Gallery, Chatham, NY; Albany Museum of History and Art; Hyde Collection and La Nuit de l'Instant-2017, Marseille, France.

Her artwork is included in the permanent collections of the Brooklyn Museum of Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Hudson River Museum, Museum of Fine Art Boston, National Museum of Women in the Arts, Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum and Tochigi Prefectural Museum of Art.

Ellen's art has been written about and reproduced in Art in America, The New Yorker, Art & Antiques, Art New England, the New York Times, Two Coats of Paint, Painting Perceptions, Hyperallergic, Blue Mountain Commons, and "Orpheus. Eurydice. Hermes: Notations on a River."

She has taught at Pratt Institute, Princeton University, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago at Oxbow, University of Massachusetts, and Art New England at Bennington College.

Ellen works onsite from direct observation and empirical experience beside the Hudson River. She has also had residencies beside the Garonne River in France. She lives in NYC and New Baltimore, NY. Ellen is currently represented by David Richard Gallery.