Eleanor Spiess-Ferris and Her Magical Realism

Well, if Komechak Art Gallery was to start off an exhibition season with a smash up painting show, Eleanor Spiess-Ferris would have to be the logical choice. Her work is stunning, engaging, curiously quirky and richly painted. The woman's subjects range from swans, to women morphing into other animistic forms and flowers and birds abound.

The delightful way in which Spiess-Ferris engages her audience is a classic game of cat and mouse. The audience is seduced by her subject and color, and caught in the cat's clutches with her mastery of the painting process, which in this case is oil and gouache. Spiess-Ferris knows her animals and birds. Many of her works include species indigenous to the Midwest, and her purpose in describing them so accurately is to preserve the wildlife around us. The same is true when she describes flowers. Their delicate blooms are handled gently by her feminine subjects.

Spiess-Ferris has been moving toward a smaller composition in this exhibit, using intricately woven painted borders around the subjects. They have a woven, protected feel from the elements, and the figures are securely placed centrally in the compositions.

I enjoy the way Spiess-Ferris' female subjects emanate out of watery bodies, and move lithely through a river. They carry the gifts of Nature (flowers and birds' nests) on their heads like crowns, or on their arms one finds a swan wrapped around the figure's body. Curous little bugs and creatures morph into one another easily, and one cannot imagine a world where this kind of things does not exist. Spiess-Ferris' imaginaiton allows the viewer to transport to her world, and we do not care if we return to our own world. The places she paints are far too interesting to leave.

Her sense of magical realism is based upon her own upbringing in New Mexico and the visual and literary influences of Latin America. That sense of a special place where things are not quite real, but surreal, is where Spiess-Ferris' own images come from.

Spiess-Ferris was born in Las Vegas, New Mexico in 1941. As a recognized artist, Spiess-Ferris’ work incorporates influences of the Spanish and Native American cultures of Northern New Mexico. She earned her B.F.A. degree at University of New Mexico, and attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Her works blend mythological, spiritual, psychological, environmental and feminist themes in dreamlike contexts. She plays with the ideas of Symbolist art by morphing figures of women into roots, trees, leaves and birds, and her work integrates elements of surrealism, symbolism and expressionism. Spiess-Ferris teaches at the The Art Center of Evanston, Illinois. She has received numerous major art awards and citations including Artist-in-Residence grants at Anchor Graphics and Paper Press, Chicago, Illinois Arts Council Fellowship Grant and a Vielehr Award from the Art Institute of Chicago.

Public Collections: Benedictine University, Lisle, IL Block Museum at Northwestern University, Evanston, IL College of Lake County, Grayslake, IL Elmhurst College, Elmhurst, IL Illinois State Museum, Springfield, IL James R. Thompson Center, Chicago, IL Portland Museum of Fine Art, Portland, OR Wustum Museum of Fine Art, Racine, WI