For more about the artist, visit her webpage at www.eweissart.com or her Blog.

Ellyn Weiss has been drawing inspiration from the biological world for many years. Although Weiss served as the first General Counsel for the Union of Concerned Scientists from 1978 to 1988, it was not until a decade later that she became intrigued by the forms and colors of the human body's internal structures. At an exhibition in Baltimore, she was moved by the beauty, depth and vibrancy she saw in photographic images of magnified cells by two Johns Hopkins scientists. She describes that exhibition as a pivotal experience, explaining that she was "overcome at the thought of this beauty twinned with functionality inside each of us." She wondered "why I bothered painting at all since I could never hope to make anything approaching the power of those images."

Fortunately she got over the second feeling but never the first. She has been using microscopic images of cells as a starting point in her work ever since, especially in printmaking.

Once Weiss selects a theme, she pursues it until her imagination plays out. She focuses on particular parts of images, enhancing and deconstructing them to create compositions of layered imagery that are suggestive of her original inspiration but never literal. She usually begins with one or more repeatable matrices (etched plates, woodblocks, or even Styrofoam blocks) to which she adds various elements of color, collage, and stenciling--often running a print through the press three to six times. A few years ago, Weiss spent ten weeks creating a series of prints based on various images associated with bioelectronics. This past summer, nerve cells provided her inspiration. The prints offered at AAF 2009 are from the latter series.

Weiss lives in Bethesda, Maryland.