MTC ART GALLERY

The MTC community art program presents:

In Transit

Paintings by Elizabeth Ennis

LunchStop Cafe
101 8th St.
First Floor

Open
7 a.m. to 3 p.m. weekdays

Artist's Statement:
One day while taking Bay Area Rapid Transit into San Francisco, I took some photographs. About two years later, they became my inspiration for beginning this series of paintings of people on BART.

Getting from one place to another, the sense of motion, of being carried along, creates a suspension of time and, within that hiatus, the awareness of another journey taking place inwardly into memory and reflection. BART becomes a dark background on which the play of life and light goes on. My paintings attempt to capture the isolation of people who are momentarily neither here nor there but moving through space. Surrounded by BART’s impersonal structure, people inhabit their own solitary worlds even when traveling together, seemingly oblivious of those around them and unaware of the odd conjunctions that sometimes take place between them.

The process of translation from photograph to painting is in itself a kind of journey. When one views a photograph the sense of a moment captured from a stream of time is paramount. Paradoxically, when I paint an image from a photograph, I am involved in distilling and concentrating the essence of what I have seen. It is a way of removing the image from the flow of time and creating an archetypal and timeless space that we inhabit psychologically. It is an intuitive process that may happen by combining several photos, or by subtle changes of perspective, color, and composition. My goal is to create an image that momentarily checks our ordinary awareness, arrests time, and causes us to dwell on the world of the painting.
— Elizabeth Ennis