Letting the Art Appear: Show at Gallery 360

Emotional, evocative and created with childlike abandon, the imaginative work of Ellen Thomson plays in the realm of the subconscious.

“I let it tell me what it will be rather than trying to turn it into something,” Thomson said.

And she means it. Thomson allows her paintings to direct themselves without question or critique. With a stream of consciousness style of painting, Thomson finds that hills turn into horses, volcanoes turn into trees or hoop skirts. She starts a work without any idea of what it will become, and often surprises herself at the end.

But these are works of art, not exercises in psychoanalysis, and Thomson doesn’t let herself get caught up in unpacking potential symbols or meanings in her creations.

“It’s really freeing to be able to paint that way; it doesn’t necessarily always have to make sense,” Thomson said. “And I like what other people bring to it; I don’t want it to be so personal that it’s not accessible.”

Ellen Thomson’s show, “The Forest through the Trees,” opened Saturday evening at .  Thomson has been showing work at the gallery for the past several years. 

Based in St. Paul, Ellen Thomson works full time as a graphic designer. With a degree from the University of Minnesota in visual communications, she has been doing graphic design for 25 years and painting seriously for 15.

Thomson said that separating her creative from her professional work was difficult at first.

“When I first began painting, they looked more illustrative and I didn’t really like that. I had to kind of turn my brain around and think a completely different way,” she said.

Thomson uses music while she paints to access the emotions and impulses necessary for her art, listening to the likes of Sigur Ros when she’s feeling meditative or Jeff Buckley if she wants to be really sad. 

“It’s often kind of dark or sad music, but I love it. It forces you to emote a little bit–tap into that feeling,” she said.

Color is very important to Thomson as well, but it’s not calculated. Her palette, which often pairs bubblegum pink with moss green and tornado grey, is intuitive. Her imagery often draws from her travel experiences, Iceland and Norway being central influences that appear and appear again. She works in acrylic, which dries quickly and is conducive to her immediate, intuitive style.

“I’m not a fussy painter,” Thomson said.

Thomson, who is captivated by the freedom and honesty in the artwork of children and whose work has a fanciful, dreamlike quality, has been interested in art since she was young. Now a mother to a three-year-old son, Thomson commented that having a child has allowed her to revisit her own childhood, and as a result, images from her formative years in Wisconsin have appeared in her work. 

Gallery 360 owner Merry Beck bought the painting from which the show draws it name to hang in her young daughter’s room. In that work, Thomson thought she was painting tornadoes, until later, turning upside down, the tornadoes became trees.

“I loved it from the moment I saw it,” Beck said.

Visit Gallery 360 to see Thomson’s work up close and personal. “The Forest through the Trees” runs through April 9.