Biography
Eileen Senner, who was born in 1945, grew up on a beef and wheat farm in Hutchinson, KS. While there were no art classes in the public schools she attended, Senner remembers expressing her affinity for art by scratching drawings into the dirt. Early on she was exposed to museums, on trips to various cities with her parents. But it was not until her second year at Bethel College, while taking a drawing class, that Senner realized that art was to be her path. With this “immediate conversion”, she switched her major from music to art, graduating in 1967.
After graduation, she moved to Port Jefferson, NY, living there for the next six years. Describing this period as the real beginning of her art education, Senner was a constant visitor to galleries and museums in New York City. She was immediately drawn to the abstract materiality of Antoni Tàpies’ work, and to the paintings of Susan Rothenberg, Ellen Phelan, and other artists who were reintroducing figuration into contemporary art in the 1970s. She has also been strongly influenced by the art of earlier ages, including Cycladic sculptures of ancient Greece. With a move to California, Senner entered the graduate program at the Claremont Graduate University, where she received an MFA in 1978. There she made assemblages of books, wood, and other materials. While living in Oregon for three years, Senner began making sculptural boat forms, that suggested both kayaks and crude archeological objects. This work lead directly to the attenuated abstract wall-mounted sculptures, made of wood, that she produced in Los Angeles, where she moved in 1981.
A 1991 trip to the Altamira Caves in Spain, was for Senner a “numinous experience”, bring her face to face with the prehistoric drawings preserved there, and with the example of art that was in touch with the deep, primal connection between humans and animals. Through much of the 1990s, Senner pursued this inspiration in a series of wall-mounted sculptures that resembled human figures with animal attributes. In the mid 1990s, Senner started making drawings inspired by ancient Greek vases and their silhouetted figures. Around the same time she began painting, soon arriving at the torsos that she continues explore. Senner slowly applies layers of oil glazes on wood panels to create glowing images floating in fields of darkness.
Senner taught for many years at Scripps College, in Claremont, CA, where she lives and works. She has exhibited extensively in the U.S. and abroad, including solo exhibitions at NEWSPACE Gallery in Los Angeles and Seventeen Reasons in San Francisco. In 1982 and 1986 she received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts.
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