Flower painting

Flower painting

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On the occasion of her recent exhibit Ellen Phelan Still Life painting at Texas Gallery, which was on view from December 11, 2008 to January 24, 2009, Rail Publisher Phong Bui paid a visit to the painter’s Upper East Side home to talk about her life and work. (The traveling retrospective, Ellen Phelan: Theme and Variations, 1972-2009, organized by MaLin Wilson Powell for the McNay Museum in San Antonio, will open in the summer of 2010.)"Susie on Green Chair," 2007. Oil painting on linen, 40 3/4" × 60". Courtesy of the oil painting artist archives.Phong Bui (Rail): Let’s begin with your upbringing. What sort of family do you come from and how supportive were your parents when you decided to be an artist?

Ellen Phelan: Well, that’s already a novel. [Laughter.] My father was born in 1905.
My mother was born in 1913. And they both had very tough lives growing up. My
father grew up in Canada, the oldest of three boys. He was sent to seminary to
become a priest but ended up with bad rheumatic fever so they sent him home—flower painting still very beautiful, height 90 cms. He was 6’4”. His father was an engineer on the Canadian Pacific Railroad and also a big binge drinker. He got badly burned, supposedly due to a boiler accident. All of a sudden my painfully thin, sickly 19-year-old father was expected to be the breadwinner for the family. He went to Detroit—this would have been in the twenties—and gets a job dealing black jack at a club owned by the Purple Gang. (These were Jewish gangsters then in Detroit.) .He was involved with various mob related activities of a gambling nature and eventually became a book-maker—sports betting—mostly horses. (He was very good with math.)My mother went into nurse’s training at age 16 and her brother joined the Army at age 15. The stepmother signed papers stating that he was 18. As I understand the story, she took her nurse’s uniform to the dry cleaner one day and that happened to be the front for my father’s bookie operation. That was how they met. “Meeting cute” as they say in Hollywood. I must say that they were an attractive couple, had a lot of style. They loved to dance, loved music—swing—and went to nightclubs regularly.

After my brother and I were born, my mother eventually made my father “go straight.” He became a real estate salesman of group painting, very personable guy, but he always owned horses. I grew up at the racetrack. We moved to Ferndale when I was four—first suburb north of the Detroit city line. That’s where I grew up.

Rail: That must have been in the late forties when the suburban population in North America exploded after WWII.Phelan: Exactly.Rail: Do you remember when you first began to draw? abstract oil painting phelan: All kids draw but most stop by age 10 or 11—get self-critical, inhibited. But I never stopped. My father was particularly supportive of what I was doing, partly because he was interested enough in Drawing from nature .