Often discussed in relation to Surrealism and Magic Realism, Ellen Lanyon’s meticulously crafted still-life compositions combine fantastical motifs that reflect a private mythology.

Her juxtapositions of exotic specimens from the natural world with everyday household objects such as scissors, sewing needles and cutlery subvert ideas of domesticity and offer mysterious new narratives both playful and sinister.

Beginning with her Magic series of the late 1960’s and continuing through the 2000’s, the performance of illusion has been central to Lanyon’s richly detailed and evocative paintings. It has also situated her among a generation of feminist artists whose embrace of intimacy and sentiment offered a counterpoint to modernism’s supposed neutrality.

In a 2008 interview, art historian Michael Rooks and Lanyon discuss the artist’s role as magician: 

MR: When we think of magic, we can think of magic tricks that basically fool the eye and the supernatural variety which has to do with modes of transformation that are unexplainable in the natural world. Both fooling the eye and notions of transformation (spiri­tual, emotional, psychological, etc.) come into play when we think of art, and especially your paintings on the topic of magic and scientific exploration. To what degree does this duality between artifice and actual transformation play a part in your studio prac­tice…?

EL: I begin by setting a stage (defining background) and adding elements via what I consider to be a stream of conscious­ness method of approach. This cannot help but be influenced by the sub-conscious which, when accompanied by intelligence and motivation triggers a visual narrative. I become the magician who can transform flowers into fire, create the animate out of the inanimate and utilize osmosis and gravity to create an illusion. Artists have the powerful tool of the imagination to make any­thing happen.[iii]

The visual impact of Lanyon’s paintings arrives by way of this exactitude emerging in tandem with a distinct, ethereal lyricism. In the late 1960s, Lanyon found a new, fertile source for drawing together mechanical-seeming objects with swirling fantastical forms and fields. Her son Andrew arrived home one day with Magical Experiments, or Science in Play, a nineteenth-century book of tricks illustrated by the wood engravings of Louis Poyet.

To Lanyon, the book’s meticulous illustrations—at once instructional and obscure, almost anticipating the opacity of Surrealism—were a revelation: they “provided the wand that precipitated a series of paintings dedicated to prestidigitation, transformation and the wonders of scientific abracadabra."[viii]

Lanyon’s engagement with Poyet’s engravings, as antiquarian a source material as they were, represented an intentional and sly engagement with her contemporary art historical moment. Art historian Christina Weyl explores this facet of the Poyet paintings, writing, “Not unlike her Pop art peers, Lanyon was appropriating mass-produced images, but from a bygone era rather than from the contemporary advertising that occupied Andy Warhol, Tom Wesselmann, James Rosenquist and others.”[ix]

“In the early 1970s, not coincidentally near the beginning of the feminist art movement, Lanyon’s creatures were trying to escape from their surfaces. In an identifiable metaphor for women’s liberation, they began quite literally to venture out of their confines.

Butterflies flew off fans, frogs leapt out of teacups, fish sprang from their ponds, snakes invaded the parlor. Birds, in particular, burst from shaped boxes and, by the mid-70s, hovered in flesh and feather over their earlier artificial incarnations. Magic, or illusion, was the final medium for their escape…"[xi]

Lanyon’s time in the Everglades allowed her to shift from the domicile cabinets of curiosity to a global ecological considerations:  

“The work is un­abashedly about survival. Its very exuberance exudes a perhaps unfounded optimism. Lanyon hopes 'the animal world itself can save us. I refuse to accept the fact that it's as bad as it is.' Just as allegory and magic are transformative models for the human condition, all of Lanyon's work can be read as ecological."[xii]

Never retiring from being an artist, Ellen Lanyon worked for over six decades, up until she passed away unexpectedly while returning from a week at The Print Studio in Cambridge. Throughout her long life and career, she remained steadfast in the mission of her practice, stating, “I always hope to communicate to others my own feelings of astonishment, amusement, and/or concern for the marvels of the natural and man-made world.”[xiv]