Beacon artist blends art and spirit
Robyn Ellenbogen considers herself fortunate to have grown up when she did because, she says, “the arts were so alive and I was so hungry.” The abstract expressionists and beat poets were her trailblazers, and she “felt incredibly nourished by how these people saw the world.”
As a child, Ellenbogen already felt like she “would never fit into the world in a way that other kids fit into the world. I always saw myself as an artist, though I wasn’t completely sure what that meant. Every kid knows something about themselves they’re not able to put into words.
“I was deeply drawn to abstract work,” she says. “It has to do with a way that one sees the world but doesn’t necessarily understand, as a child, that you see the world in a very unusual way. These are the things I thought about.”
Decades later, Ellenbogen, whose exhibition, Turning Toward Avalokitesvara, opens at the BAU Gallery in Beacon on Saturday (Oct. 14), is still curious. She moved to Beacon two years ago, seeking community.
Her implements and materials include metalpoint, artist books, textiles, installations, papermaking and animation. She describes metalpoint as a 12th-century technique used in Europe before the discovery of graphite.
“If you were going into the studio and wanted to do a sketch, you’d be priming a piece of paper so you can draw with metal, silver, gold,” she explains. “Silverpoint has the capacity to oxidize over time depending on humidity and temperature. Initially it can look like graphite, then in the changing light over a day the drawing can appear to glow. There are metal artists who spend a lot of their time ruminating what to do their drawings on.”
While at the High School of Art and Design in Manhattan, Ellenbogen would cut class to visit the Museum of Modern Art to see the works by Gorky, Pollock and Barnett Newman. “I was deeply smitten,” she says.
After attending the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, Ellenbogen worked for the artist Louise Bourgeois. “She helped me form and support my understanding and feeling that, ‘Wow, I’m in this for the long run. What unique capacity do I need to develop a body of work that will matter?’ We’d spend nights making prints and reading William Blake. That was the model that helped form me as a young artist.”
As a teenager, Ellenbogen found herself drawn to Asian art. “I couldn’t understand what it meant, and I thought it was beautiful,” she says. She came upon an artist who was practicing Zen Buddhism and became a teacher to her. “I flourished from that point on,” she says.
After many years of study, she became a Buddhist priest, inspired in part by her work as a teaching artist with ArtWorks Foundation, a nonprofit focused on chronically ill and dying children and young adults and their families.
Her spiritual beliefs and her art “are so deeply connected and important that I can easily weave between them,” she says. “Lots of people start meditation with a goal of being calmer. What I learned over many years is that, if there’s any goal, it’s to help other people.
“I’ve always worked in unique situations making art with people from very untypical backgrounds,” she says. “I continue this work, now helping families who, for whatever reason, have to leave their homeland.”
Ellenbogen also intends to become a death doula, which she feels is “intimately related to making art because of the ritualistic practice that can be involved. Art is pretty much what matters most to me.”
Turning Toward Avalokitesvara — the latter the name of the figure in Buddhist iconography associated with compassion and the benevolent protection of the world — will be on view at BAU Gallery, 506 Main St., in Beacon, through Nov. 5. An opening reception is scheduled for 6 to 8 p.m. on Oct. 14. The gallery is open Saturdays and Sundays from noon to 6 p.m., or by appointment.
