Ellen Corddry, 66, is an artist with an eye for detail and a heart for the natural world. The avid hiker and artist has illustrated books, won awards and has had her work featured in shows throughout Maryland.
Corddry primarily creates in two mediums: watercolors and woodcuts, which she creates in her Columbia home studio.
When Corddry was a student at the Maryland Institute College of Art, she explored a variety of mediums—as she says most artists do—but these two mediums were where she found what felt most comfortable with her personal style.
“It works with the way I see things—woodcuts are simplified and sharp,” Corddry says, explaining how one of her teachers had suggested she give it a try.
Despite her favored medium of watercolor being very different from woodcuts, she found the different styles allowed her to use different parts of her sensibility.
For woodcuts, Corddry explains, she cuts wood to create a printing plate. She uses pine wood because the soft wood is easier to cut. When she chooses which piece of wood to use, she looks for one without many knots, because those are tougher and can create inconsistencies in the surface. Sometimes she’ll start with a preliminary study or a detailed drawing on the wood itself and look at the mirror image when planning a composition.
“With a woodcut there’s no turning back, so you have to be pretty sure of what you’re doing,” Corddry says.
Watercolor, she says, is much more forgiving. But no matter what medium she’s using, her distinct style always comes through.
When she finishes a woodcut print she hangs it to dry on a clothesline that spans her studio. Corddry never creates more than 100 prints of the same woodcut because each print presses down the soft wood, and after about 100, the quality of the print would decline.
Her portfolio is filled with colorful renditions of birds, mushrooms, forest scenes and insects. But recently, the artist has begun a foray into something new—collages.
Her most recent artistic venture began with a thought, a few misprints and a pile of scraps.
“Sometimes I have misprints or, in the cleaning process of pressing scraps of paper to the woodblock to get the ink off of it, I end up with a nice, sort of textured black and white image—and I would add paint to it and create all different types of collage papers,” Corddry explains.
Through collage, she has managed to combine the two very different mediums that have dominated her career as an artist.
The textured printing paper becomes rock, and the watercolor becomes its namesake in a new quarry-based composition.
The quarry composition was inspired by Corddry’s recent hike around a granite quarry. Her hikes often serve as inspiration—though it doesn’t always strike her in the moment.
What she creates is often tied to her mood, which she says is subject to change. There are also times where she sees something that inspires her but it might take a while for her to figure out how she wants to approach the subject.
Corddry describes a recent piece she did that was based on a study of a man on a hike.
“It took me a while to figure out exactly how I was gonna do it. I decided on a long rectangular composition concentrating on trees that were sort of blue green,” Corddry says.
The colors, lines and details of what she sees on her hikes are ink-transferred into her work, which evokes the authentic experience of nature in the viewer. The detailed mushrooms feel like a memory of leaning down on a hike to study one in the same way the vibrant colors of a bird’s plumage seen through a network of stark branches might take a viewer back to their last trip down the mountainside.
“It puts me in a meditative frame of mind, and there’s always beautiful things to see—I like trees, I like water,” Corddry says. “There’s always new things to see outside.”
When she sees the trees on her hike, she considers whether the lines of the branches would lend themselves well to a woodcut. When she sees a water scene, she feels drawn to watercolor.
Corddry has an upcoming show running from Sept. 25-Oct. 27 at the Artists’ Gallery in Ellicott City. The show will also feature the collage works of Diane Dunn in partnership with Corddry.
Corddry, who has been working with the Artists’ Gallery since 2015, says she enjoys it because the themed events are exciting and draw a lot of people to the gallery. She also appreciates the company of her fellow artists.
