Ellen Sweeney, a Leawood, Kansas, painter in the impressionist style, also depicts the French impressionists’ most controversial subject, the manmade landscape.  In this case, that is often means construction sites in the growing Kansas City suburbs.  Her first urban landscape was the Tomahawk Bridge located at the end of a jogging trail where Ellen exercises.  She has continued to depict the environment of her daily life, mostly what she sees as she drives in the metropolitan area — a world populated by cranes, trucks, forklifts, and construction workers.

Ellen’s petite and stylish appearance does not suggest an artist whose main subject matter is the heavy equipment and skeletal steel of large building projects.  In fact, she grew up doing manual labor on a farm near the western Kansas town of Coldwater, and has an affinity and respect for the laborers who assemble these huge puzzles of iron and concrete. She is also fascinated by the daily, dynamic changes she observes from the minivan.  Her color choices, which might be said to feminize the construction scenes, were influenced by the “Southwest palette’ of sunny pastels, and help to make us aware of the beauty of the everyday.

Although Ellen has sketched from life since early childhood, the path to painting was a circuitous one.  After graduating from Missouri University as a social studies teacher and then teaching for four years, Ellen returned to college at UMKC Law School.  She practiced law for seven years following graduation in 1979.  Her odyssey as a painter began in 1988 when her husband gave her painting lessons for Christmas.  She continues to study with K.C. artist Charles Stegner, as much for the contact with other painters as anything.