It's About Vocabulary - More Details On Artist Ellie Bogardus

Following is another California central coast newspaper article about artist Ellie Bogardus. I found this one in a scrap book compilation my mom had kept of newspaper and magazine articles about family and friends. The article is full of information that was reported from an interview of Ellie by managing editor Sam Vigil, Jr. of the Cambrian. (I don't know what is the relationship of The Cambria/San Simeon Country News to The Cambrian, but the writer of this interview is also a managing editor of the Cambrian.) This article pulls together a lot of the information that has been turned up in earlier posts: her house, the cats, travels in France and Italy, her style...

Buenas Noches print by Bogardus

This past week I also received a photograph of an Ellie print titled "Buenas Noches" from the Johnson collection - a family that was a neighbor of hers' on Nottingham Drive. The family also has a print of the painting titled "The Streaker." As pointing out in the interview below, Ellie kept a book of photographs of her paintings, and as other artists do, sold prints of the originals as well.

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The Cambria/San Simeon Country News

February 18-24, 1981

Gourmet-artist-author in love with life

By Sam Vigil, Jr.

It was anticipated that an interview with Ellie Bogardus, know as the “Cat Lady” in deference to her penchant for feline images, would take the familiar form. However, the artist had a different course in mind.

She handed over a scrapbook containing photographs of her work and suggested I look through it while she discussed her art and continued on her latest painting – a couple sitting in a European café.

On the wall was the only painting she said she kept, a self portrait showing her having a good time in an Italian café. She spent ten years in Europe, about half that time in Italy.

Ellie Bogardus sits before one of her works in progress.  The feline friend with her is included in her painting so frequently she is sometimes called the "Cat Lady." In the accompanying interview she talked about her painting and philosophized about cooking, humor, and life in general. When her painting style was likened to that of Matisse, she researched the great artist's life and found coincidences that "sent shivers up and down" her spine.

People kept saying my work looked like Matisse,” she said. “But it doesn’t.” Then people must be associating her bright and vibrant colors with those of Matisse, I thought. She continues; free association is her guide.

“Not too long after I was back from Europe, I thought, ‘I wonder where Matisse lived?’” She researched a little and found he lived in a place called “Cambrai.” “It just sent shivers up and down my spine” she said as shivered again. To top that, her voice rising, “He died in 1954 and that’s the same time I went into Chouinard (Art School!).”

“There appears to be a similarity,” wrote Richard Challis of Challis Gallery in a brochure of Ellie’s work, “to the bolder works of Henri Matisse, but compare carefully: Matisse, more often very serious, with Bogardus, bursting with humorous satire, unafraid to mix special art form with unmitigated jole de vivre.”

Ellie’s joy of life is probably illustrated well in her self-portrait in which she is joyfully sitting in an Italian café, while in the background the proper Italian ladies have their tea and cream in their little tea cups and an Italian gentleman looks on in wonder at these crazing Americans. And of course, there is a feline peering into the café through the wrought iron-type fence.

Another painting, probably my favorite of the ones I saw, shows a girl talking on the phone. As the cat behind her reaches for a fish from those on a platter, the girl is saying, “Come on over, darling. We caught some lovely fish for dinner.”

Speaking of which, Ellie is a gourmet cook.

“I’m an inventor in the kitchen,” she says. She is also in the process of inventing a cookbook. “Some of those recipes are my friends and some are my great inventions,” she says as I turn the pages of the cookbook she had plopped before me.

“I love to go mushroom hunting,” she says as I try to pronounce “Des Champignons,” “The Mushrooms,” one of the first recipes, illustrated with large mushrooms of the type one only finds in a wooded area. Ellie proceeds to tell me the story of a friend of hers who she says believes that mushrooms go back into the ground when the sun comes up.

Other recipes appear: Tart aux Fraise Al’ Alaska; The Three Little Clucks, “I see no reason that humor can’t be eaten,” she says; Crab Meat Mousse; Mock Canard, a leg of lamb made to look like a duck; Charlie’s Gin Fizz. She also has a section with kitchen hints, like putting a slice of raw potato on a burn and the pain goes away immediately.

Aside from her painting, Ellie Bogardus revels in the world of gourmet cooking. She theorizes "I like to cook probably because I flunked chemistry class the second week. It's kind of like a chemistry class (cooking, that is), mixing thing together." She revealed another maxim, "I see no reason why humor caan't be eaten." She offered dishes with names like Crab Meat Mousse and ...Mock Conard.

Ellie’s cookbook also contains recipes for outdoor picnics under “Un Pique-Nique Elegant.” As a matter of fact, there are four such recipes of four different outdoor picnics she has been on with other friends, including a friend she works with on the Charlie Brown animations. For each one they dressed up in period costume and on the third picnic, even hired musicians. These picnic recipes are illustrated with snapshots so one can see how such an elegant affair should be put together, carpets, table settings and all.

And speaking of books Ellie is writing, she pulls out two children’s books, both of which she illustrated. She says she wrote them a number of years ago but hasn’t marketed them yet. One is an alphabet book, each illustrating what she coined, her humor evident: An artistic acrobat, an archangel, an adorable alligator and an amusing anchovy all ate an apple; On Halloween, a happy heiress hid a hippopotamus in a hermit’s house; With vases of violet, a vagabond on vacation voyaged in a vermillion vehicle to visit a volcano.

The next time I went to visit Ellie, she said she wanted to talk in the kitchen. She said she was more comfortable there. It was obviously the kitchen of a gourmet. There were many “kitchen toys”, as she called them, hanging on the wall, utensils I’d never seen before.

We played a guessing game when I asked her to tell me what some of the utensils were for. I was feeling pretty good after I figured out that a certain mallet was for mashed potatoes and figured out a three-legged metal contraption was some type of shredder. But I never id guess the bean stringer correctly.

Amidst all this she was preparing pigs feet for her dinner. She had tried the pigs feet together and put them in boiling water and from time to time threw in herbs, spices and other assorted ingredients.

“Let me tell you something,” she said. “If you are a gourmet chef, it is very rare that people ask you to dinner. It’s not just me. It’s happened to some of my friends, too.”

To one side of the sink, I notice, is a small placard handwritten on it: “Procrastination ins the only spontaneous reorganization of my priorities.”

“You know,” she said, “if you want to do an interview the right way, should ask me what my favorite things are.”

“Okay, what’s your favorite food?”

She rattled off some name of a meat I’d never heard of, perhaps more because meat had not been a large part of my diet than because of its exoticness on might expect of a gourmet. The blank look on my face must have betrayed my ignorance.

“It’s a cross between a Smithfield ham and…” her voice trailed off as she moved from behind the counter to a shelf of cookbooks. “Well, her, let me show you,” she said as she rifled through the books lined on the shelf. “Oh, where is that book,” her voice had a tinge of anguish.

“I keep my mind continually blank,” she remarks distractedly, still looking for the cookbook. “I don’t want to clutter it up.” She hints this has something to do with creativity, allowing ideas to come to her move freely.

“Chicken liver pate is another favorite. I love any kind of pate.”

One of Ellie’s favorite foods to fix is Chinese food. And she likes a North African dish called couscous, a grain, like millet, used like a rice and put in soups.

“I like French food and Italian food.

“I really think a good dish should have as many “things to tantalize the senses as possible. “It should be exciting.”

Ellie uses the example of a steak that many people just savor, saying she would be bored with it after a couple of bites.

“But if you take that steak and slice up mushrooms and a whole bunch of other things, that’s more exciting”

She turns to her pig’s feet, raises the lid and sniffs as the steam rises. “How’s it smell,” she says half to herself. “Something’s missing. Parsley and tosses it in.

“I like to cook probably because I flunked chemistry class the second week. It’s kind of like a chemistry class, mixing things together.”

Back to favorites, she says James Thurber is her favorite author “because he’s funny.” And she like children’s author A.A. Milne, who wrote among others, “Winnie the Pooh.” She likes Milne because “I had a deprived childhood. I discovered him late.

“Read science-fiction if I don’t have anything else, I’m a nut about atlases. I like to travel. I want to go to China. They say if you’re going to travel, go to China now, because in 20 years they’re going to look like the rest of us.”

Ellie again checks the pig’s feet.

“I’d try anything once,” she says. “if you gave me an elephant’s foot I’d taste it just to see what it’s like.”

A little later we got back to talking about her art and painting.

“When I really get into a painting,” she says as she stands before a partially finished canvas, “I can see exactly how it’s going to look, all the colors.” She talks with a little wonder about a book she read, “To Paint is to Love Again,” which had been written by a writer [Henry Miller] who had also written some pretty raunchy sex novels.

“Forget about everything else,” she said about the intensity she feels when she gets going at the canvas. “It’s like a love affair with color. It’s hard to explain. “You have to look at things with humor–or else where are you? You have to laugh at things around you, or you could cry. Life is so grim that if you can’t giggle and find your little niche, you might as well go to San Francisco and get mugged.”

She describes how often she gets angry at her semi-invalid mother who lives next door. Ellie says “the mother” calls and complains about some of the simplest things. Like when her mother’s roof leaked, “the mother” called about what to do. Ellie told her to put a pan to catch the dripping water with newspaper on the bottom to keep the water from splashing. Later when Ellie went over to check out the situation, “the mother” had pulled out an angel food cake pan and put it on the floor. It made Ellie mad, she said, but it was one of those humorous situations.

Bogardus house on Nottingham Drive

It was time to say goodbye to Ellie’s cats and three dogs. As I left I looked back toward the gate to see a sign on the fence labeled “Ellie’s Cattery.” I passed the wooden mailbox that looked like a cat. Ellie called my attention to the side wall of her house, that she said she had to move because of a quibble with a neighbor over the lot line, and she had to leave off the wood shingles because of a fire hazard.

Wall mural interpretation

Ellie moved to Cambria when she returned from Europe ten years ago. Her aunt, Eleanor Chambers, Los Angeles vice-mayor under Sam Yorty, had owned the property.

The wall was drab gray plaster, very unlike the Ellie Bogardus I had been visiting. But that was not without her touch. She had drawn felines in a tree and in a garden.

Turn Back The Pages - Artist Ellie Bogardus in the News

My wife has been caring for my dad in his home for the past four months - my mom moved to assisted living in November. While going through some of my mom's things still in the house, Jan came across a newspaper article about Ellie Bogardus in the Cambrian dated August 18, 1983. Like Ellie's paintings, the text in the local paper was bright and descriptive, and biographic - tells a story about the artist, much like her paintings. The writer, Shirley Howell, is mentioned as an alumnus of the paper in an article this past summer about the Cambrian moving office locations. Whether Howell is one of the youngish staff shown in this photograph, I don't know, but this picture also gives a feeling of fanciful playfulness, like an Ellie painting.

The Cambrian staff in the 1970's

But of greater interest to me is the cross-referencing of Bogardus's painting The Streaker in the news article, that it was on display at the Cambria Coast Gallery (a photograph of the piece is found in an earlier post), as well as mention of another work, Somewhere Over the Rainbow, that is captioned by Howell: "...a typical part crowd which includes a banker and his wife, a retired actor, a gossip columnist and others." The article mentions Ellie having done a European tour in the 1960's. I was a gentleman in Italy who came across my my blog and furnished me the photograph of The Streaker - his brother had received the painting from Ellie when he visited her in 1982 (perhaps the memory of dates was slightly off since the painting was on display in 1983).

Shown in the newspaper article is photograph of the artist in her studio - the only one I have seen of her working at her craft.

Bogardus at work in her studio

Also, a copy of news photo of Ellie with her painting Somewhere Over the Rainbow.

Artist with her painting

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The Cambrian, August 18, 1983 – Page 13
Life’s episodes on canvas
Ellie’s paintings depict fat cats, dancing friends and more…

Story and photos by Shirley Howell

Ellie Bogardus pulls her acrylic painting right out of life’s most impressionable episodes.

Plucked from daily experiences in the kitchen or in her garden, with fat cats, dancing friends, at gourmet picnics or parties, her characters burst from the canvas in bold, simple designs and electrifying purples, oranges, reds, blues and greens.

Each with a story to tell, the images convey Ellie’s excitement with life.

“I’m just a born wacko – that’s all!” the Park Hill artist explained with a subtle smile. With a tongue-in-cheek, child-like quality evident, Ellie appears to relish the idea of unfolding a story.

“They’re like my children,” she said. “They’re something that come from me. And they do have a story behind them.”

One enormous painting call “The Streaker,” currently on exhibit at the Cambria Coast Gallery, paints the story of a naked man about to job through a park full of people. The viewer observes that, upon his jaunt down the winding path, the streaker will encounter a nun with some children, three old men, a woman eating a sandwich, a mother pushing a baby stroller and more, with a good possibility that he may upset all of them.

Another painting, depicting a sleeping cat (a favorite subject), a burning table lamp and a bird stepping out of a cage in the background, is aptly named “Impending Disaster.”

“You know something is going to happen,” Ellie says with a twinkle in her eyes.

A native of Long Beach, Ellie attended Chouinard Art School in Lost Angeles and has a long list of illustration credits, including the designing of background for the animated “Fractured Fairy Tales” and “Crusader Rabbit” and more recent Charlie Brown specials.

Following a six-month world tour during the 1960”s, Ellie settled in Paris, where she designed several award-winnings films for Les Cinemastes.

Although she insists that other artists have not influenced her work and that she has never had to “search around to find a style,” Ellie became familiar with the work of Henri Matisse after friends pointed out the resemblance between her work and the impressionist painter’s.

“I did some research one day and found out that he was born in Cateau, France, and didn’t live far from a town called Cambrai,” she disclosed. “And he also died the same year I went into school. I thought that was sort of strange – I don’t know if there is such a thing as split souls.”

When Ellie is not working in her enormous seaside garden or concocting a gourmet meal with husband Mike (lovingly portrayed as a pleasantly-plump television watcher in her painting, “The Man, His Dog and His Woman”), she is creating detailed backdrops for Garfield the cat and his friends to [gallivant] about in their upcoming movie.

The artist also has ready for publishing two children’s books and a gourmet cookbook that she has written and illustrated.

Several of Ellie’s painting will be included in “Creatures – Wild and Otherwise,” a show opening on Saturday at the Cambria Coast Gallery. A wine and cheese reception for the show will be held from 4-7 p.m. (The public is invited).

Across A Landscape - More Ellie Bogardus

The Streaker by Ellie Bogardus

This past week I received an email from Ellie Bogardus aficionado Allesandro who has furnished other information about Ellie and pieces of her art to this blog. This latest is titled, "The Streaker," which shows a naked man (the streaker in the upper left hand corner) running into a complex park landscape scene. This painting is the most complex in subject matter that I have seen, next to the mural that was etched into the south wall of Ellie's house in Cambria. The information that Allesandro furnished about the painting was it was given to his brother Alberto by Ellie when he visited her in Cambria around 1982. The painting is now displayed in a place where, "...he can often look at it, taking a pause or enjoying an holiday relax time." I appreciate all of the different sub-stories that are shown: a nun following a group of school children walking in a line, a dog-walker, people talking at a park bench, men playing chess, a woman walking behind a baby stroller - very interesting. The style/colors are still very Ellie Bogardus.

Titled Drawing - Another Ellie Bogardus

I received another Ellie Bogardus original "in the mail." Thanks to Todd for contacting me and furnishing another example of Ellie Bogardus' art. I wonder if his grandparents or other family member's paths crossed sometime with me or my family during the last 30 years.

Protective and Curiosity, 1980

Todd had come across my blog and wrote that Ellie had given his grandparents this painting - Protective and Curiosity. The bottom left of the painting has a personal inscription the grandparents, "To Bill & Teen From Ellie." Todd's father wrote him that his parents had been to Ellie's house several times with his great uncle Ward "Toot" Fulcher (1), who was a personal friend of Bogardus.  Each year when Bill and Teen vacationed, they would drop by with Toot for a visit with Ellie. This 1980 piece reminds me of the ones that my brother and sister-in-law have framed and hanging on the wall inside their front door entryway.
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(1) I received more information today (3-10-2014) from Toot's daughter Jennifer about her parents and family connections that vacationed regularly in Cambria. It is great to expand the biographic background about Ellie Bogardus. I am expecting more photographs of Ellie originals from Jennifer, soon.

I was showing my mom your blog (and explains blogs) and came across this post. ...[M]y dad was the "Toot" mentioned in your blog. He came from a family of eight and his grandma called the youngest "Toot" till the next child was born. She passed away before the last child was born, so dad was stuck being "Toot" to his siblings and "Uncle "Toot" to his nieces and nephews. [M]om was the huge Bogardus fan, and bought all but the large painting, which was an extremely surprising xmas gift to mom. As teachers, it was stretched their budget. ... [M]om and [D]ad rented the Rosenleib's house across from Ellie's whenever they could, and Bill and Teen (dad's sister) stayed a weekend a year or so with them. All the relatives loved to stay in Cambria, and the Rosenliebs made their house available and affordable to mom and dad.