Ellen Weitkamp

Ellen Weitkamp is a multimedia artist who blends traditionally perceived ideas of painting with contemporary processes in her mixed media paintings. Born, raised, and now working in Kansas City, Weitkamp uses her familiarity with the city to reinvestigate spaces she often glazed over previously. She completed her Bachelor of Fine Arts in Painting and Art History at the Kansas City Art Institute in 2019.

When viewers approach Ellen Weitkamp’s work closely, a comprehensive illusion splinters into a fragmented material reality. As a result, the painting’s fabricated world becomes at once past and present: a memory embodied. 

Weitkamp’s work focuses on the details of the everyday by portraying ordinary moments and objects in familiar spaces that are exciting not in spite of their mundanity but because of it.  These moments consist of her contemplation of the space she inhabits and the desire to capture visually the fleeting emanation she feels from them. Weitkamp is not striving to recreate a scene from nostalgia for the past, but to reproduce the timelessness of the instant. Time is something she strongly values. In Weitkamp’s paintings she hopes to redress her own desire to slow down time and create the space to breathe and be present. When she looks at her paintings Weitkamp feels a great sigh of relief in that the moments she felt were going unnoticed by her everyday can now gain a shared appreciation by many.