Ellen Grobman is a painter based in Amherst, Massachusetts, where she has lived for more than 25 years. She has had a daily studio practice for a decade longer than that, and without it, she says, “nothing else is in balance, nothing else completely works.”

Her abstract pieces are vividly colored and delicately textured. They communicate, through elegant gestures and veiled messages, a visceral emotional undercurrent, and a desire to connect. Her work has been shown extensively in Massachusetts, New York, and other places on the eastern seaboard.

This drive to bring something into being, disrupt it, and then flirt with its destruction—the boundary of something existing and then not—echoes throughout her paintings. Most recently, her work was shown in a solo exhibition at University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

Raised in New York, Grobman knew she wanted to be an artist since early childhood. During high school, she took courses at the Art Students League and the New School in New York City. She attended Cornell University School of Art, earned her B.A. at Goddard College, and did a year of graduate work at Hunter College. During her time living in Manhattan, she worked in Information at the Metropolitan Museum, and at a studio in pre-gentrification Union Square.

Grobman has enjoyed being part of a large blended family for many years, was a Big Sister, has eight years of experience as a hospice volunteer, and is a self-described “political junkie.” She is also an avid hiker, and climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro in 2013.