Ellen Phelan (born 1943) is an American artist known especially as a painter of formalist abstractions, psychologically charged scenes enacted by dolls, and landscapes.
"[8] The New York Times art critic Ken Johnson wrote, "Ellen Phelan has painted her way through a number of phases over the last three decades, from formalist abstractions to psychologically fraught portraits of antique dolls to meditative still lifes to the pastoral landscapes that this show comprises.
What has remained consistent, besides an always assiduous care for the craft of painting, has been the Modernist tension between material surface and illusory depth and a postmodernist play between romance and irony.
"[9] In an interview with Phong Bui, in The Brooklyn Rail, Phelan says of her Fan pieces: "Most of them thought they were sculpture, but I saw them as paintings.
By working with irregular perimeters, I felt it was a continuation of the earlier things I was doing which involved cutting and tearing, folding, collaging the fabric, then painting on both sides.