Ashlee Ferlito

This week I found myself in Ashlee Ferlito's studio in the Mission. She has been painting in oils there, supported over the last couple years by grants and part-time work.

Though she always enjoyed drawing and playing dress-up, Ashlee Ferlito was really quite the studious type:

"I really loved sciences throughout high school and my elective had always been art"

She started Yale as a biology major, but found the classes lacking in engagement. Eventually, she switched to art - a move she now considers inevitable:

"I just started to get way more interested in my art classes cause I really felt like a person in them, they were smaller, and I was active within them and that made me realize how important art was to me"

Working in oil painting, she took inspiration from classical masters, like Diego Velazquez and Francisco de Goya, but also modern abstract impressionist Philip Guston. After graduation, received a grant to study art in Cyprus:

"There, I was able to really decompress from the intense situation that college was - with so many opinions coming at me, especially at a place like Yale. There's so much theory and conceptual[...] heaviness"

She turned her focus to aesthetics, inspired by the local landscape. The experience solidified her commitment to making art:

"[I] got more in touch with what I wanted to say and when I was finished and what I wanted to make. Let the opinions wash off or flow to the surface and sort of make sense of them. It was a real time of processing [...] also proving to myself that I could do it on my own and that it was really important to me"

She returned to her hometown of Carmel and eventually made her way up to San Francisco. Ferlito continued to draw a number of landscapes, but figurative works featuring animals became an increasing theme:

"I sort of looked at these beasts of burden [...] horses and bulls [...] as vehicles for my emotions. I would feel something strongly and I wanted to tell a story about it and the way that I could do it was through an animal"

Ferlito's stories were very personal and emotional. While she connects her emotions to the animal subjects, the subjectivity of her stories is expressed in elements of her painterly style:

"They're a lot about memory [... The reason] the horses are see-through sometimes is because the sort of shape-shifting that happens in my memory [...] Most people's memories aren't still. They move a lot and they're hard to hold on to and that's something I try to evoke in those paintings"

She created a series of works along those objectives, but Ferlito sensed the underlying stories could overwhelm the painting:

"I was trying to tell a full story in those other paintings and in a way I realized that by telling a full story it was almost leaning towards illustration [rather than painting]"

As such, she has shifted away from figurative works for now, towards more abstract paintings. The emotional nature of her work continues, however:

"Before I was drawing subject matter from the outside world and connecting with my heart [...] In my more recent work, more of the abstract work, [I'm] drawing forth imagery from within [...] and really trying to close my eyes and imagine a mental landscape or a spiritual landscape"

One series is suggestive of outer space, a disconnected landscape of sorts, reflecting such personal desires as balance. The result is often a complete departure from her earlier work:

"I think right now the paintings that I'm working on are a real jump, a real shift from what I've been doing for the last while. I'm interested to see the conversations that come forth"

Given the emotional nature of many of her paintings, it's no surprise that Ferlito expresses some anxiety over sharing her work.

"I'm sort of scared to [show my work] a lot of the time, but when I do I'm warmed by the connections that I make to people through it. Often times people will create their own narratives to go along with the paintings and that's so special for me [...] I think that's one of the aspects that I really love - the storytelling and exchange of information"

See Ashlee's work at Ritual Roasters from November 9 - December 14. You can also follow her blog.