Our visiting guest speaker was Yi S. Ellis, all the way from Centennial, Colorado!
Yi began by telling us all about her fascinating life! From growing up in Shanghai, China, where she began formal dance and piano training at age four, to dancing at the White House and the Kennedy Center for Performing Arts! She has traveled the world and holds degrees in International Relations and once worked on Wall Street as an investment banker.
Yi is an abstract painter who integrates the spirituality of Chinese traditional paintings with the expressiveness of modern Western art. Her love of love for dance and music injects liveliness and movement into her work.
Yi uses a limited pallet of Michael Wilcox watercolors and a small Cotman watercolor travel palette when she paints plein air.
For technical paintings where she must get the color exactly right, Yi made many color charts to use for reference. This is also a good way to remember what color mixes make other colors!
Yi is a very petite woman and the chair to table height were giving her problems during her demonstration, so one of our members gave her a pillow to sit on. Yi then folded it in half to adjust her chair height, and it worked perfectly!
Yi began her demonstration with a small painting she had already started. She then when on to explain her color mixing to make the tree branches, the pink crab apple blossoms, and tree leaves. Yi worked from a color photo she had taken, along with a black and white print of the image to show the different values.
Yi is a very well prepared woman! There often is not enough time for a guest artist to paint and entire painting, and Yi brought a completed one of the same thing she was working on for our group.
One of Yi’s painting mentors once told her, painting is just solving one problem at a time. Good advice and something to remember!
