“I begin to paint or to draw without knowing where I am going. Three minutes or three months later, suddenly the work surprises me, and then I know I have arrived.”
Ellis Jacobson (1925-2013) was born in San Diego, California, and studied at the La Jolla Art School. He continuing his training at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris and Studio Hinna in Rome before settling permanently in Mallorca, Spain in 1963.
His early development was shaped by both formal study and a sustained engagement with European modernism. Working across both abstraction and figuration, Jacobson developed a distinctive approach that moved between structure and spontaneity, often seeking not only physical likeness but an underlying sense of form and presence.
His work has been exhibited widely and is included in museum collections around the world.
Selected Artworks
Gallery of Ghosts
“They resemble faces of memory, specters waiting at the edges of time, entering uninvited yet returning with such persistence that one is compelled to accept them: faces that are at once beautiful, distorted, and in flux.”