Ellen Altfest does not just paint from life; she paints life as it happens. With a devoted and methodical studio practice that seems just as much a part of the work as the final canvases, Altfest paints strictly from real life observation. Her studies include everything from collected objects to models who return day after day (sometimes for months) to viewpoints in the forest where she returns until the work is complete. These finished works are highly detailed and rendered meticulously, capturing every particular bump, gash, and speck of dirt on a feast of gourds and making felt the way a thread of fiber on a blanket has pulled looser than the others over time. The result is her small but tactile canvases, which vibrate with life, despite appearing to be static. 

In Gourds, painted between 2006 and 2007, Altfest’s subject is quite literally aging and changing as she continues to paint. The yellow gourd at the center appears relatively fresh and bright, while a green one at the back is almost entirely rotted. It’s tempting to imagine that she painted the yellow one first, and by the time she reached the green one, it was already beginning to spoil. In this way, her unique approach allows her to capture a vivid sense of progression and movement in a single, unmoving, image.  

Viewing another work, The Armpit (2011), we again see the time and devotion in Altfest’s craft: her technique of applying paint heavily involves layering, erasing all evidence of brushstrokes. This allows the paintings to build upon themselves and perhaps record and encode their own hidden histories of development over time. The way one blue vein might have been enlarged on a particular day, the direction in which each strand of hair happened to curl and rest, or the deepened pronunciation of a wrinkle over time…all of these variables have been accounted for and recorded by the artist, and now appear to occur simultaneously, as she has distilled the minute changes into a single artwork. These evolving layers make Altfest’s paintings seem profoundly alive.  

Altfest even stretches her close attention and perception of time across multiple canvases. In Trinity and Billy Goat Point (2025), we see the same tight and specific viewpoint (Altfest’s paintings are always to scale from her perspective) showcasing two pinecones: in the first, they are tightly shut, and in the second, they have opened entirely. Looking closer, the leaves have also begun to change color, and the woodpile that is present in the first has been gathered for use, indicating a change of season. What can be learned by studying this blooming, by observing so closely these small changes over time, allowing them to unfurl before our eyes? Altfest’s work thus offers an alternative for how to exist: one frame at a time. The work models a certain respect for the objects and bodies which surround us and prompts us to wonder what this deep sense of presence during our practice of looking could do for the quality of our perception. 

Notes:

1.  Altfest, Ellen. “Conversation: Ellen Altfest.” Interview by Sherman Sam. Ocula, February 15, 2019.  https://ocula.com/magazine/conversations/ellen-altfest-in-conversation/ 

2. Altfest, Ellen. “In Conversation: Ellen Altfest with Phong Bui.” Interview by Phong Bui. The Brooklyn Rail, March 7, 2019. https://brooklynrail.org/2019/03/art/Ellen-Altfest-with-Phong-Bui/ 

3. Altfest, Ellen. “How Artist Ellen Altfest Built a Fully Functioning Studio Outdoors—and Manages to Resist Cell-Phone Distractions While Painting There.” Interview by artnet. Artnet News, May 24, 2021. https://news.artnet.com/art-world/studio-visit-ellen-altfest-1970710 

4. Berger, John. Ways of Seeing. London: Penguin Books, 2008. 

Isabel Beeman is an educator at Wrightwood 659 and a writer who recently completed her MFA at the University of Colorado Boulder. Her interests include modernist literature, transgressive ways of writing, and surrealism.