amy ernst
artist biography
“An artists’ life is very hard, don’t become one, and don’t marry one.” --Amy Ernst’s father Jimmy Ernst told her when she was 16.
In 1979, Amy was married to an opera singer, working towards her Masters in Arts Administration and Business at Indiana University, Bloomington, and really trying to follow her fathers’ advice. Then she read Lee Seldes' book, The Legacy of Mark Rothko, and started to build her first collages and constructions.
As a teenager, Amy attended a boarding school in upstate New York called Darrow, which was formerly a Shaker Village. Living among the historic buildings was quite an experience, and for Amy, learning how to renovate the old buildings and the work on various school projects, helped to make her aware of living history, and gave her an appreciation for past cultures. The school also allowed her to investigate her varied interests like painting, poetry and theater without her parents’ influence.
Amy is the fourth generation of artists in the Ernst family. The first generation (that they know of) is Amy’s great-grandfather, Philip Ernst. He was a teacher of the deaf and the blind in the small industrial German town Bruhl, and was known in the town and surrounding areas as a portrait painter. He painted family portraits including one of Amy's grandfather, Surrealist Max Ernst. On a few occasions, Amy was invited into Max's study. His shelves were filled with old manuscripts, maps, objects d’art, chess pieces and books on Eastern philosophy, poetry, mysticism, and Astrology. Amy realized many years later that his spiritual energies and imageries had become a major influence on her work.
Her father Jimmy Ernst was part of the second generation of abstract painters in New York. He arrived in l938 on Ellis Island like so many fleeing Europe, and found that the New York art world in the l940’s and ‘50’s was so small, that everyone pretty much knew one another. Jimmy Ernst worked various artistic jobs, including designing store windows, jazz record covers and movie posters, working for the Museum of Modern Art, and then in the art department at Warner Brothers. Amy’s mother Dallas was also was working for Warner Brothers, and in l946 they met and were married for 38 years, until Jimmy’s untimely death in l984.
At home growing up, music was always on-- mostly jazz and Mozart, and there were all sorts of artists, famous and infamous, visiting. Amy thought this was the norm, but as a young woman she met many incredible people like Bauhaus architect Marcel Breuer, playright Edward Albee, actors Eli Wallach and Anne Jackson, artists William deKoonig, Ihbram Lassaw, Hedda Sterne, Lee Krasner, Grace Hardigan, Larry Rivers, political people like Alger Hiss, and theorist Betty Friedan.
Amy’s father died unexpectedly on February 6th, 1984, and the world changed for her. He had been writing his biography called A Not So Still Life, about growing up the child of a genius father and being raised by all the surrealists. His mother Luise Straus-Ernst was a prominent writer and an independent free thinker, and gave up her life to save her son from war torn Germany, vanishing on one of the last trains leaving Paris for Auschwitz. The memories of her father are so vivid for Amy, and she feels that the spiritual connections are stronger than ever. She never thought she would become an artist too.
For 20 years, Amy’s work has developed into its own, mostly using collage. The technique is nothing new, but the way the work is imagined, built and placed is uniquely her own. When she went to Santa Fe to study with John Baldessari at the Art Institute for the summer there was a realization that the landscape was a tapestry, and landscape has maintained a focal point for much of her work. Amy started working with printmaking, using photographs from my travels and collaging them in various ways before designing her solar-plates. Encaustics have also been a big part of her work. Taking encaustic pigments, heating them and working with collage materials on paper, wood and plaster have moved many of her ideas out of the traditional collage realm. Amy says that books are her “true love.” She builds books by inserting, collaging, tearing, builiding and taking away objects and images, and can take years to complete just one.
Amy feels that all her work has stemmed from her background, of course, but also life in general. She says, “I have lived so many lives: in the theater as a set designer, working in galleries, travel, post-graduate studies with artists such as John Baldessari and master printmaker Robert Blackburrn. I never went to art school to be formerly trained. My drawing skills are just about nil, but I still try, but then I look at the work of Joseph Cornell and he couldn’t draw either. I now rely on photographs I have taken, deconstructing old collages and paintings and the computer. I don’t know what I would do without it. But the passions and the dreams of creating a new art-world within my own mind is ever-growing and ever-changing. . . I am still discovering myself, and that self is every changing and growing, through my poetry or collages, meditations, travels or just being with friends or my beloved. Life as an artist is hard and disappointing and wonderful and so on and so forth. It is what it is and never what it should be.”
