Ellen Burgin
San Francisco, CA
Ellen Burgin is a San Francisco–based painter whose work has been exhibited nationally and is held in the permanent collections of several U.S. museums.
Message
Ellen Burgin has exhibited her work nationally in galleries and museums and her work is included in the permanent collections of The Huntsville Museum of Art in Alabama, Alexandria Museum of Art in Louisiana. Burgin is the recipient of several grants and awards for her work, including a Wake County Regional Artist grant and a Vermont Studio Center Artist Residency grant and was a 2024 artist-in-residence at Vashon AIR. She received a BFA from the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, and her MFA from Louisiana State University on a teaching scholarship. Born and raised in Marion, North Carolina, a small town in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, Burgin has called San Francisco home since 2006.
Statement
In painting, I embrace doubt and indecision not as obstacles, but as creative forces that resist certainty and guide the emergence of form. My process is a balance between discovery and intention, unfolding through many compositional shifts, repetitive mark-making, and layered overpainting. The resulting works suggest ambiguous bodyforms or invented terrains.
My paintings resist easy categorization and often exist in the space between abstraction and figuration, where the familiar dissolves into the undefined. I draw from a wide range of influences, both physiological and psychological, such as the subtle muscular mechanics behind a genuine “Duchenne” smile or the perceptual distortions of migraine auras.
Reworking is essential to my process. I often return to paintings, layering over or fully obscuring earlier compositions. The resulting surfaces are dense with color, texture, and physical presence serving as evidence of time, decisions, and refusals. My mark-making reflects an ongoing inquiry, where boundaries are proposed, blurred and often ignored as shapes emerge through accumulation and erasure. This practice reflects my trust in the process and my resistance to settling for easy answers.
For me, the nature of a painting is a question and, at its core, is a place of permanent restlessness. Painting offers a way for me to explore the tensions between clarity and ambiguity, memory and invention, beauty and awkwardness. Through this ongoing process of searching, reworking, and letting go, I strive to create paintings that provoke inquiry rather than provide resolution–works rooted in the uncertainty of not fully knowing.