The cat’s name is ap-propriate, too. Camatkara (its shortened version sounding like “chama”) is an ancient Sanskrit word with two meanings, which together describe the essence of Ennis as a painter and a person. It means “delight of artistic experience” and also “bliss of pure I-consciousness.” In the artist’s own words, this translates into a lifelong goal of being “centered in awareness, simply being present and awake—not lost in my thoughts.” It’s a way of living, she says, that “makes me very receptive to the beauty around me.”
Clearly, such a state is also conducive to the creation of striking still-life paintings that draw the viewer into a similarly serene and focused frame of mind. With a single source of light on carefully chosen objects, Ennis produces images that combine a powerful sense of clarity and solidity with a feeling of deep and penetrating quiet.
This is Ennis’ hometown. In fact, her large, comfortable studio was produced by removing walls in the house she lived in from the age of 10 through high school. In a town full of scientists em-ployed at Los Alamos National Laboratory, many young people are pointed in the direction of science, she says. But as the youngest child of a physicist father, she left that path to her older brother and sister. Instead, she followed her mother’s encouragement to express herself with art.“My siblings got all the pressure [to pursue science]. I just got to grow like Topsy. They fed and watered me and didn’t push me in a direction that wasn’t natural to me,” she recalls. “I grew up playing in the woods. The beauty of the natural world was so much a part of my life, and our family took camping trips to Colorado. My father was an avid rock hunter, which was another avenue of finding beauty in natural things.”
“The kind of attention and care one gives in daily life will become the kind of attention and care that goes into a painting. You can’t be totally thoughtless and inattentive in life and then suddenly become present and mindful of beauty just when you’re painting,” she explains. “If we chop a painting up into things that are important and things that are not important, we’ll probably chop our life up that way too. If a painting is unbalanced, maybe that’s reflective of a life that’s unbalanced as well.”
In daily life, Ennis fol-lows a meditation path called Siddha yoga, with roots in South Asian spiritual trad-itions, that helps train her attention to return to the present moment. This aware-ness not only opens her eyes to the beauty that exists but can also work the other way. “Sometimes beauty itself stops me and throws me back into the present,” she says. “That’s what I hope my paintings do for others. If I can portray the beauty of light and color and edge, maybe it will throw the viewer back into the present.
When she’s painting, Ennis draws the blinds on all but the single north window and uses no electric light. As a result, her ar-rangements receive a constant, single source of cool light, and her working day is bounded on either end by too-dark-to-see. At the moment, the gently fading light is touching one side of a large, early southwestern Pueblo pottery bowl adorned with curving designs in rust-orange and black. Ripe plums surround the bowl, and the arrangement sits on a woven textile with a simple, pale-colored pattern.
On the easel, mirroring the scene, is an almost-completed painting. The painting contains the addition of a couple of curving slices of cantaloupe and a small bunch of purple asters—items whose limited span of freshness took them out of the live arrangement once they were painted.“For this painting I started with the color in the cantaloupe and the orange color in the pot. And there was the arc shape in the painting on the pot, and the shape of the cantaloupe wedges. So there were some echoes in shape and color. And then there was seeing what was in the yard, like the purple asters, that could enhance and contribute to that combination,” Ennis says, explain-ing one way inspiration arises and shapes a new work.
“Often it comes from seeing something beautiful and trying to figure out what it is that captures me about it. Maybe it’s something I’ve seen before that didn’t seem that interesting, and then suddenly it resonates,” she says. “It can be the way one thing looks, or the way two things look together, that will grab me. I’ll put it up there, and then there’ll be an impulse to put something else with it. It’s very intuitive—just the feeling of what enhances that original idea.”
Throughout the experience of choosing and arranging objects and then painting, Ennis contin-ually, gently returns to an inten-tion of clear perception, “without the veils of preconception.” This way of seeing, she adds, is about “loving a deeper sense of still-ness. I enjoy painting from that place as much as I can.”
Featured in December 2002
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