Meet Ellen Sperling | Artist & Former English as a Second Language Teacher

We had the good fortune of connecting with Ellen Sperling and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Ellen, why did you decide to pursue a creative path?
I am not sure if people pursue artistic/ creative careers or if artistic/ creative careers pursue them.

Can you open up a bit about your work and career? We’re big fans and we’d love for our community to learn more about your work.
Being an artist in my experience is not easy, in the sense that there is always this longing for more time, more uninterrupted time, always this longing to do more, to get better. As soon as you finish one piece that you think is OK, it suddenly is not good enough and for your next piece, you want to do some aspect better, or develop in another direction. It is the “blessed unrest” that Martha Graham spoke about: “No artist is ever pleased. There is no satisfaction whatever at any time. There is only a queer divine dissatisfaction; a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others.” I don’t know if artists are “more alive” than others, but making art is what makes me feel alive, so easy or not, I can’t imagine any other life.
For me, art is a form of communication, as I said above. Though sometimes I just want to paint or draw figures, landscapes, trees or flowers to capture the beauty of nature, often my work, particularly my sculpture, is implicitly political. I want my work to offer hope—not simplistically, but defiantly, to encourage us in our struggle to live consciously, graciously, with meaning and dignity.
I am proud of the times someone said my work moved them, made them cry, made them feel seen.
Along the way, I have gradually learned to let go of some of the pressure to expect every piece to be good. In part, that was something I learned– a need to justify making art– because it was hard for me to value it. (The world is not waiting for your art; it won’t pay the bills… the fact that art is not always valued in this society / economy has sometimes made me feel that the work had to be “good” to justify the time I spent on it.) But I have learned that you have to do a lot of bad work to get to the good. You have to just keep at it. Which takes a tremendous amount of confidence, over a long time, which the work might not seem to support. So you have to just enjoy the process of doing it, and have a need to do it, whether the work itself is good at first.

Let’s say your best friend was visiting the area and you wanted to show them the best time ever. Where would you take them? Give us a little itinerary – say it was a week long trip, where would you eat, drink, visit, hang out, etc.

Shoutout is all about shouting out others who you feel deserve additional recognition and exposure. Who would you like to shoutout?
When I was in art school at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, there was one art history professor who had an approach to teaching art history that was a revelation. I wasn’t required to take art history classes; I already had a BA, but I had wandered into one of Professor Susan Denker’s classes and the way she talked about artists, I was so engaged that I attended at least one of her classes every term. Unlike a lot of art history professors, she didn’t just give you a lot of facts and dates to memorize. She had really researched the artists she discussed and she brought you into their daily lives and the choices they faced. The fact that Paul Klee’s wife was supporting the family and he was drawing and painting next to his son, who he was taking care of. That Klee was making puppets for / with his kid at the same time as making more traditional art. And how these facts might have influenced his work. Or in discussing Cubism and the collaboration and competition between Braque and Picasso, she would show what Braque was working on or had just exhibited and then what Picasso was doing at the same time or in response. She did something similar with Picasso and Matisse, showing how they influenced and differed from each other.
She showed us that these great artists were not always the famous people they later became. They were people like us, art students, emerging artists, bumbling along, looking at other artist’s work for inspiration, making choices about the direction they themselves would take. She took us into their studios and their heads and conveyed to us that it was not predestined that these artists would become who they later became. Which made us feel that we were part of a larger community of artists, throughout history, all trying to bring forth our work. It was incredibly encouraging. And I am forever grateful to her for her inclusive approach to art history.

Website: https://www.ellensperling.com

Instagram: @ellen.spiral

Image Credits
watercolor: N/A scanned image; others: David Caras