40” x 60” Oil 2025

“Unfinished Gardens and Peculiar Scrawls” moves away from traditional landscape while referencing it - in a more poetic and metaphoric way. These works move through representation and abstraction.

I work in a non-narrative, intuitive way responding to each work as it emerges. This work began from the idea of unfinished gardens as a metaphor for the dreams and impulses of younger selves and how the interaction with life’s living shapes our experience and creates spaces for re-imagining these ”gardens” or life chapters over time. In my case, eight decades of time.

As well, the act of painting itself presents each work as an unfinished garden that is becoming and disintegrating, simultaneously like our present world. One work leads to the next as in life.  The fragility and strength of our natural world is reflected in our own temporality and our world - being one and the same. 

For me, the unknown in the act of making art is the magic that has consistently kept this energy of creation leading me to the next - always seeking for that one thing, knowing there is never one thing.”

~Wanda Ellerbeck~