Eleanor Schimmel

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Eleanor Schimmel’s encaustic paintings have been featured in major exhibits for over 25 years.  She has distinguished herself in the field of encaustic painting with numerous awards and recognition, museum exhibits and public installations.  Her inventive use of this ancient technique of painting with pigmented wax has elicited high praise for her abstract works. Helen A. Harrison of the New York Times notes, “Eleanor Schimmel treats paint as a sculptural medium...their texture and mood recall the landscapes of Albert Pinkham Ryder, but without Ryder’s explicit symbolism.”  Edward Sosanski of The Philadelphia Inquirer describes Schimmels paintings as “mystical in an archaic way, implying both the enormous vitality of nature and its historical continuity....painted in an atavistic manner that makes it seem like a Neolithic icon.”

Within Schimmel’s painted boundaries, process and pigment could be the sole definition of content, however, the results of her densely layered, carved, and enamel like surfaces open themselves to a wide range of interpretation and response.  Her commanding use of wax and pigment give a material presence to her work and provide a foundation for further exploration and appreciation of painting in its truest sense.

Eleanor Schimmel attended the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, is a graduate of Moore College of Art and Design and honored as the 2005 Distinguished Alumna.  She resides in Haverford, PA and works at her studio in the Norristown Arts Building in Norristown, PA.

Artist Statement

The art of drawing into a poured surface of molten wax requires a unique risk and spontaneity in the action itself. Artists tools in hand,  familiar objects  to every artist, and  pushing  through a path of yet untold imageries and resistant new sensations is an imposing challenge.  A drawn path that emerges often before a thought.  A process that allows for both chaos and control. Chancing loss in the continuing action of fusing with a blow torch creates its own act of courage and tenacity.  All of these elements define the merging relationship between  the act of art and the artists actions.  It is the pursuit of this challenge that best describes my curiosities in exploring warm and cold, hard and soft, the conscious and the unconscious, chaos and order.   In the works presented, although different in subject imagery, the exploration is similar...materials and process most obvious, but a similar concern for content.....what lies beneath the visual surface, the artists untold questions, concerns, secrets and curiosities.

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