Since the mid-1990s, Northfield, Minnesota artist Jill Ewald has explored how to visualize interior and exterior human connections though painting and drawing.

Stylistically, Ewald’s work is as abstract as the concepts addressed by her work. Often using a square format support, whether it is paper, canvas or board, Ewald works with oil paint, graphite, conte crayon, encaustic and charcoal. Her works are defined by a thick, textural surface, which often has been sanded down and reconstructed. Suggesting a palimpsest, the surface is tactile, one of traces, makings and forms that emerge into and disappear from focus, a visual parallel to how we are attuned to and unaware of our senses. Ewald’s works are also highly associative, seemingly embedded with cryptic narratives acted out by animated surface markings, soft erasures and abstract shapes and forms.

In 2000, Ewald began to investigate the power of the sphere. She questioned whether this simple, reductive form could convey these human connections and still project a sensuality that would be grasped by the viewer. Depicted in various numbers and configurations, the spheres recall a stack of buoys, billowy clouds receding to the horizon, grapes suspended on a vine, a pyramid of billiard balls or an avalanche of balls cascading to the center of the composition. Ewald is also a passionate colorist. Sometimes the spheres are depicted in a moody black, grey or midnight blue ensconced in dark, empty grounds. In other compositions, the spheres are vividly colored in saturated hues, perhaps symbolizing the various connections she is seeking to portray. A red tendril-like form and a shifting, diagonal line also mark many of the works. For Ewald, the former symbolizes a woman’s blood and, thus, the artist’s presence in the work. The latter is a formal compositional device that grounds the image within the picture plane like a horizon line, giving the work a conceptual time and a place. Regardless of hue or scale, a monumentality, even a gravitas permeates her works.

Ewald cites as an art historical influence the still life genre, as practiced by Cezanne or Morandi who investigated the essence of objects through spatial constructs and shifting perspective. She also notes German Expressionism and Romanticism as stylistic influences in terms of color, abstraction and psychological depth, and such artists as Howard Hodgkin, Frank Auerbach and Peter Lanyon. Ewald received a M.F.A. in visual arts from The Vermont College, Montpelier, Vermont, and a B.A. form St. Olaf College, Northfield, Minnesota. Since 1998 she has been the director of the Flaten Art Museum at St. Olaf College. Her work has been exhibited frequently in the Midwest at venues such as the Rochester Art Center, Rochester, MN, Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Circa Gallery, Minneapolis, the Duluth Art Institute, Duluth, MN, and the Plains Arts Museum, Fargo, North Dakota. Her work was also included in the American Drawing Biennial at the Muscarelle Museum of Art in Williamsburg, VA, and the Westmorland Art Nationals, a juried exhibition in Youngblood, PA. Ewald’s work is also found in several private collections.

-Mason Riddle