Ellen Jean Diederich: Failing Toward Success

By Millie Hanson
Visual Arts Editor

Found living in a Saskatchewan basement without the benefit of a house sitting above it, artist Bruce Mao wrote this in his Incomplete Manifesto For Growth as one of 43 points: “Keep moving. The market and its operations have a tendency to reinforce success. Resist it. Allow failure and migration to be part of your practice.”

Local artist Ellen Jean Diederich has a similar point in her book, “Progressive Painting.” She said, “Fail toward success. If you aren’t failing regularly, you aren’t challenging yourself.”

Diederich’s lifelong practice (passion, really, equal parts love and obsession) has been art, and her chosen medium—watercolor. Her paint, with all of its myriad hues, impregnates the heavy, textured watercolor paper with striking immediacy. The clarity of even low-key hues is imbued with incredible power.

She paints every day, a practice all artists strive for but don’t always achieve. The chapter in her book titled “Prevailing Through the Process” illuminates the origins of Diederich’s inspiration for daily practice. When asked for advice on how to get in the mood to paint, her mentor Rose Edin responded quite matter-of-factly.

“I am going to tell you this only once. You don’t wait until you’re in the mood – you start and get in the mood.”

Ellen is one of the founding members of the Red River Watercolor Society, and was an active member for 25 years. She has also taught the medium locally and nationally.

Diederich’s hands are weapons: concise and brilliant, directing the water-suspended pigments to do her bidding and exercising command over a wide range of subjects – foreign cityscapes, barnyard livestock, local downtown scenes, flower gardens.

The last of which are even more alluring once the audience knows why they are responding subconsciously to these deceptively powerful, relatively small works of art. The colors themselves shape the viewer’s reactions and emotions. Her series, called Healing Gardens, makes these connections.

Red, one could guess, energizes and excites the emotions but the artist also believes it shows the honest, open and free nature of ourselves. White emphasizes purity (again, known) but Diederich says it also gives strength to keeping the mind open to new ideas. And on and and on she leads us through the color wheel, expanding our awareness while explaining her reasoning.

At 12 inches square, one of her paintings is nice, a group of 4 is building to a crescendo, and when nine are shown, their cumulative effect is deeply powerful. It’s no wonder that local hospitals and other organizations have ordered reproductions of this series to help their patients regain their former selves and shorten the long road back to recovery. The power of encouraging positive mental, and thus physical, progress is Diederich’s goal.

She knows first-hand about pain and healing. She has five titanium plates in her neck, which effectively ended the long stints craning over a flat table that she needed to create her watercolors. She has had to readjust her sights and chose to render her new works, including Healing Gardens, in acrylics. Her frustration, and at times resignation, over jumping mediums is evident.

“I painted all day yesterday, some parts destructively, other making progress. I received an email with acrylic paintings by another artist with so much light and realized how dark the works I’m painting are. [I’m] having in particular trouble with one. Lots to learn [with] acrylics.”

Acrylics can certainly be a tricky medium to master; they dry a shade darker than they appear when wet and become essentially a very thin sheen of plastic which resists any reworking. Determined to master them, Ellen has optimistically taken on this new challenge. From all appearances, and judging by the crowd at her V.I.P. Room opening last month, it looks like she’s succeeding.

The key to Diederich’s success in reaching a wider audience with her Healing Gardens series is serializing her paintings. She uses a reproduction technique called giclée (jee-clay), a French word meaning “to spray on” or “to spray ink”.

This technique meets the high standards of the fine art market and is the most archival of all comparable processes. The original artwork is digitally scanned and sent to a special high resolution ink jet printer. The prints are then reproduced on watercolor paper, archival paper, or canvas. The results is artwork that’s amazingly similar to the original, making it almost impossible to detect any difference in quality, besides possibly an actual texture of paint (acrylics and oils, especially with heavy impasto, come to mind).

To build on Diederich’s entrepreneurial spirit, here are a few more resources to promote both yourself as an artist and also to get your work seen by as many future buyers as possible.

Giclée printing, Fargo: Mathison’s Express Press Graphics, http://www.mathisons.com/giclee
Their pricing is always custom to the artwork, based on size, which stock is used, if they scan the original, any needed design or layouts, color or image corrections, and/or stretch and frame.

Istockphoto: http://www.istockphoto.com
This site is another option besides Getty Images for stock photography, illustrations, and video if you need to get inspired. Plus, the pricing structure makes it easier to use if a download is needed.

ImagineFX: http://qr.net/ImagineFX
The link goes to a wide range of digital art workshops available to download, for free, in PDF format. On the ImagineFX.com site (Fantasy & Sci-Fi digital art) there are also Art Challenges. Portfolios can be uploaded and people can comment leave feedback.

Flickr: http://www.Flickr.com,
Another easy way to share photos of artwork, with a unique URL.

Jakprints: http://www.jakprints.com/
T-shirts can be printed in quantities as few as one (nice!) and can be all-over and fully printed from neck to waist. This company can also print anything else you might want: brochures, banners, business cards, CD booklets and covers, notepads, letterhead, etc.

VistaPrint: http://www.vistaprint.com
Most widely know for their business cards, which are available for free but only if you get their logo printed on the back of your card, they also have many printable formats including paper, pens, address labels, etc.

Wordpress: http://www.wordpress.com
Lots of templates to get a website up quickly (you can also design your own layouts), and the great thing is that if you change your mind and pick a different template, the site can change - seamlessly. Remember to save a copy/back up a functioning version of the site before updating versions of Wordpress as some things that worked before may “break” with the new version.

And for all you artists who pay the bills by being art teachers:
School Arts magazine: http://qr.net/SchoolArts
For K-12 art teachers, the print magazine comes to your house/school, and is also available online with articles and free art lesson plans.

To see Ellen Jean Deiderich’s Healing Gardens work, go to http://qr.net/HealingGardens

Her book “Progressive Painting: Your Creative Journey”, is available at local bookstores and through online booksellers.

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