Ellen Lanyon

At 86 years old, Ellen Lanyon physical status not available right now. We will update Ellen Lanyon's height, weight, eye color, hair color, build, and measurements.

Lanyon spent the early years of her career in her hometown, where she was often identified with the Chicago Imagists. Her first paintings were of city-scapes. The perspective she choose was influenced by her travel on the Chicago "L", as well as the 15th Century Sienese paintings she viewed in the Art Institute galleries. This "sophisticated primitive" work continued until the late 1950's when she became inspired to paint larger works in oil. Her works from this period (late 1950s to the 1960s) include portraits of relatives and the rooms they inhabited. Several years later, Lanyon developed an allergy to the solvents used in oil painting. Although Lanyon had worked in printmaking before, the allergy marked a major transition back to her earlier medium.

In the 1970s, Lanyon moved to New York City and became a member of the Heresies Collective, which created Heresies: A Feminist Publication on Art and Politics. In 1976, Lanyon received a commission from the Department of the Interior to work in the Everglades, which she says "awakened [her] to the environmental crisis" and led to art with a heavier focus on flora and fauna. Toward the end of her life, she began depicting objects from her collection of curios, many of which were inherited from relatives, such as a tobacco jar which once belonged to her grandfather. The jar, which is shaped like a toad wearing a red waistcoat, appears in several of her works.

Lanyon's art has been characterized as Surrealist or Magical Realist, and she sometimes used the term "dreamscapes" to describe it. Her fantastical compositions often feature animal, vegetal, and floral motifs. Later works frequently depict everyday objects imbued with both domestic and menacing overtones and have been compared to the metaphysical art of the 1910s and ‘20s.

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