James Matthew Ellenberger was born in Chicora, a small town in Western Pennsylvania. Growing up he spent most of his time in the woods with his father, his brother, and a cat named Angel. He became obsessed with the “smaller world” inside of the world, gravitating to insects and all sorts of wee beasties. By the time he was seven, a congenital disorder in both of his legs, a result of his father’s exposure to Agent Orange in Vietnam, made getting around more difficult. Cast after cast, operation after operation, James had to spend an increasingly large amount of time indoors, where he started to show interest in sculpting and went on to create a number of claymation videos, all shot on his Gameboy Camera.
This early foray in visual arts was relatively short lived. Once he was in high school, James developed an interest in poetry, which was like that “smaller world” that he loved so much: a self-contained miniature revelation. He became obsessed. He went on to study English Literature at Allegheny College, after which he completed an MFA in Poetry at The Ohio State University and a PhD in Comparative Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Cincinnati.
In 2018 his mother passed away after a prolonged illness. This shook his life to the core and made him realize that somewhere along the way through his many years of school, he’d become an alcoholic. He got sober, with the help of AA, in October 2018—but there was still a huge void in his life where drinking used to go. At his brother’s suggestion, James started sculpting again, something he hadn’t done since he was a kid. It clicked immediately. It felt like exactly what he had been missing in his life, and it really was. Once he poured his time into art, he didn’t feel like he was fighting against his sobriety anymore and was finally ready to move forward.
Then 2020 came along. The in-person meetings that he’d come to rely upon where all put on hiatus. He saw many friends fall of the wagon, a few of which didn’t survive hitting bottom again. Frustrated, feeling lost, James broke his pen while writing in his journal and then started to move the ink around, which became the foundation for his interest in painting. After spending years “learning” how to write poetry in a rigid academic environment, James decided that visual art was going to be a wholly exploratory experience; successes and failures would be tied to trial and error rather than the pursuit of someone else’s mastery. James is a self-taught artist and very proud of it.
The result of said experimentation has been hundreds upon hundreds of strange pieces that are wrought with detail and explosive color. His paintings are an attempt to interact with the “smaller world” that he fell in love with as a kid. He strives to evoke the feeling of looking at moss on a log and wondering if there’s a city sequestered among that intricacy.
"(g)landscapes" is a series of paintings based on Zendar, an alien planet that James’s father invented. He told James and his brother that their real father was from Zendar--that his ship serendipitously crashed in the woods behind the house. For years he painted pictures of a magical home planet where Zendarians lived in harmony with the land. The buildings were organic and grown rather than constructed. People traveled to work on enormous bees that flew around by farting (it was a story for kids, afterall). James paintings embrace the extreme symbiosis of the world his father created. Everything is connected, and if there is a focal point, it's a passing one. These (g)landscapes, born of the pineal tundra, invite us to consider the foundation of Zendari culture: that we're simply part of the world, not the center of it.
James is a member of Art House Kentucky and is a recent member of the Kentucky Crafted program. He lives in Richmond, KY with his partner, Anna, and a little black cat, BK.
