this is a story of love... or maybe fantasy.
Ellesse Nyree Garvin is a figurative artist exploring the boundlessness of abstraction while serving as a witness to the emotional terrain of adulthood: its desires, ruptures, and quiet recoveries. This body of work unites two intimately linked series: paintings created during her relationship with her girlfriend, and paintings made in the aftermath when she became her ex. Together, they chart the transformation of intimacy itself, from shared performance to private reclamation, through the lens of the erotic body.
During the Relationship
These paintings revel in the immediacy of connection. The gaze is reciprocal, the viewer occupying the position of a partner. Poses are inviting, playful, and sometimes lushly staged with symbolic objects to amplify seduction as a shared act. Here, desire is connection: intimacy functions as a bridge between two people, and the paintings are alive with the tension of being both subject and muse.
After the Breakup
The later works shift the stage. The erotic becomes self-authored, still charged, but directed inward. Bodies are cropped, gestures partially obscured, and mark-making becomes looser, more expressive, as if filtering the moment through memory rather than offering it in real time. The gaze may meet the viewer’s, but it no longer belongs to them; it belongs to the artist. Desire here is self-definition, with eroticism existing as reclamation, autonomy, and even confrontation.
Across both series, Ellesse employs her personal color theory and the transformative qualities of mark making, using found images from social media alongside memory to bring body and matter to her interior ruminations. Rarely is there a final image in mind before painting. Each work begins with a wash of pink or translucent red, a sensuous undercurrent, followed by a painted sketch. Compositions evolve on the canvas, blending preplanning and intuition, shifting as songs, books, and lived moments seep into the work.
Like her practice, her paintings move in a Sankofa rhythm, past informing present, present reframing past. In both series, the erotic body becomes a living temple: in one, a site of shared pleasure; in the other, a territory of self-possession and transformation.