Ellen Sherman-Zinn is a gifted painter working in an Abstract Expressionist mode.   For sheer painting skill, she has proved to be the most advanced student in this year’s graduate program.  What has been especially pleasing is her restlessness, a desire to challenge the color combinations and compositionally uniting gestures that are already in her repertoire.  This regenerative self-questioning is discernable in her recent work, where figural elements and landscape space are giving signs of reappearance.

Like many of the original AE painters, Ellen speaks of the blank canvas as a metaphysical arena, equating is with her life.  For Ellen, painting is a way of keeping going.  As obvious as that sounds, it strikes me as both a mature and a humble assessment on her part of what the act painting offers the painter.  Ellen came to painting fairly late, after a career in fashion.  Her fierce belief in the primacy of painting is that of a convert, not of one born into the faith.  Her orthodoxy is rendered unorthodox by her intensity.

Stephen Westfall
Art in America
Visiting Critic, Montclair State University, Spring-Fall '86