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Do We See Them by Robert C. Ellis

Do We See Them by Robert C. Ellis

Do We See Them

Robert C. Ellis

Title

Do We See Them

 
Artist

Robert C. Ellis

  1923 - 1979 (biography)
Year
1951  
Technique
color woodcut 
Image Size
11 3/4 x 23 7/8" image size 
Signature
pencil, lower right 
Edition Size
3 of 7  
Annotations
pencil titled and editioned 
Reference
 
Paper
delicate cream laid 
State
published 
Publisher
artist 
Inventory ID
19124 
Price
SOLD
Description

This rare impression of "Do We See Them" was done by New Mexico artist Robert C. (R.C.) Ellis, who studied with Adja Yunkers at the New School in New York in 1949. Yunkers moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico in the late 1940s where he began experimenting with imagery related to the Native American petroglyphs.

Ellis moved back to Albuquerque in 1950 and lived intermittently with the Tarahumara Indians of Mexico's Sierra Madre whose art he greatly admired. It is probable that Ellis studied again with Yunkers and experimented with the woodblock techniques being developed in Yunkers' Rio Grande studio.

This image has a modernist mystery within its composition. Is the title a reference to ancestral spirits, jokers and jesters, ghosts? Are they the flattened petroglyphs of ancient birds or insects or Paul Klee like abstractions of natural phenomena? The answer is in the personal experience of the viewer.