The Art of Eleanor Spiess-Ferris: Where Dreams and Fairytales Become Nightmares
- Diane Thodos
- Feb 15
- 11 min read
A review of “Drinking The Moon” Koehnline Museum of Art, Des Plaines, Illinois, July 10–September 19, 2025
by Diane Thodos
I’m an inward traveler, and I’ve traveled deeper and deeper into my inner thoughts over the years…. It’s not whether you show. It’s that expression, getting that feeling, getting your adventure, getting your images, getting your ideas out somewhere and struggling with those issues. That makes you alive.
– Eleanor Spiess-Ferris 1
I love to entice people into my work with pretty colors and fabrics and lovely birds. Then once they are in, I hit them over the head with a baseball bat to make them see what I’m getting at!
– Eleanor Spiess-Ferris
When your demon is in charge, do not try to think consciously. Drift, wait and obey.
-Rudyard Kipling 2
At first glance the painting Shallow Waters (2010) attracts the eye with brilliant aqua blue and a bright custard yellow. A stately woman stands tall, wearing a skirt filled with water that seems to resemble a birdbath that is whimsically inhabited by different waterfowl. Her torso, which wears a sumptuous orange garment with a collar of elaborate ruffles placed on a fantastic bodice of quilted squares suggests the lavishness of a Shakespearian costume. But looking deeper reveals a darker cast to the scene. The woman’s face expresses something between sorrow and sternness as she tries to precariously balance herself in high-heeled shoes on a tiny chair. The birds have menacing teeth and glaring eyes, expressions that are positively reptilian in their aggressiveness towards the viewer. Beneath her watery skirt her naked pudenda is exposed and random daubs of paint, like some improvisational painting palette, disrupt the scene—throwing its spatial logic into chaos. The narrative draws the viewer into a psychological undertow, to a place that speaks of suffering, anger, and protection from harm. For all its lyrical color and sweet floral motifs, the scene becomes a fairytale gone bad, revealing danger for the woman in a precarious situation. There is a kind of rot below the surface of what is presented about her life. The decorative effulgence of the scene betrays it’s irony, implying there should have been happiness and the protection of innocence where there was none.
Much of the esoteric symbolism in Eleanor Speiss-Ferris’s self-invented narratives come out of intense memories of her experiences growing up on a small farm in New Mexico from 1941 to 1953.
Most of my childhood was spent in a wild apple, plum orchard that grew behind our house on a small farm. It was here that I discovered an imaginary world beyond the real. I felt the weight of the seasons, the migration of birds, and the never-ending thrust of insect life. 3
This haven, known to her as “The Bramble,” became a refuge from loneliness and a place for imagination and play as a way of trying to make unconscious sense of her experiences and family relationships growing up. Her mother was emotionally distant, “a thwarted person” who had exhausting duties raising four children and running the farm. For Eleanor, escaping outdoors and into solitude became her private refuge. Alternatively, she came to admire her flamboyant and rabble-rousing suffragette aunt who championed the rights of Native Americans and Hispanic people. Her father, who became the chief justice of the New Mexico Appellate court, came from a family with strong progressive socialist beliefs. Unlike many men of the 1940s and 50s he was an early feminist, being very supportive of his daughter’s artistic desires and challenged her to think deeply and critically. He was also a whimsical storyteller who invented tales about imaginary creatures, an influence that directly inspired Eleanor’s own fanciful myths and self-invented narratives.
A significant turning point in her life happened when she encountered Mexican folk on the themes of suffering and death. The Catholic Penitente Brotherhood, known for rituals of self-flagellation, created ritual carts that seated a large carved skeleton, used as a reminder of death’s dark power during Easter ceremonies. She saw one of these “Death Carts” at a relative’s gallery in Taos where she was also deeply impressed by a folk-art wood carving by Patrocino Barela, depicting a helpless rabbit being devoured by a snake. “Was I either the snake or the rabbit? Was the skeleton coming for me or was I the skeleton?” 4 This expressive art liberated Eleanor. “It gave me the permission that I do not have to make pretty pictures.” It allowed her to go to places that were uncomfortable and dark, places where suffering and mortality met. “The more bleeding Jesuses and Santos [suffering saints] there were, the more I devoured it.” Traumatic childhood memories of violent storms, and even a dangerous flood that nearly swept her away, explain the ominous presence of approaching storms, tornadoes, and floods in her paintings. “I like to have things that are dangerous. I like the unsettling feeling of danger.”
As a young woman, Eleanor often confronted the inescapable threat of groping and sexual harassment. “You could not get off the school bus or go to the swimming pool without experiencing it. All my life there’s been a lot of sexual harassment. Terrible! Awful! You couldn’t do anything about it because nobody was going to believe you!” These hardships she faced alone as a young woman are poignantly expressed in one of her recent paintings, The Innocent(2023), an expression of her rage against sexal abuser Donald Trump and the mysogynist exremism of the far right
. A devil pounces on a young woman in a white gown and pins her to the bottom of a boat. He mercilessly bites her face as he prepares to rape her. Three winged angelic figures try to rescue her but to no avail, while nasty little creatures rise up from the water ready to drag her down. Works like this and many others illustrate Spiess-Ferris’s struggle for artistic and personal self-realization against the malignancy of patriarchal domination. They frame the narratives in her work as an existential struggle in a hostile terrain.
Before the 1970s it was difficult for men to accept that women were artists.
As the 40s moved into the 50s I soon realized that artists were men. …So, what am I? I thought. I was an artist, but certainly not a big ‘A” artist—that was a “for men only club”. …Only one art teacher at the University of New Mexico was encouraging—most discounted my desire to be an artist of note… [at the Art Institute of Chicago in the 1960s] I was discouraged from being an artist by every male teacher.
She never forgot one of her teachers declaring “The most creative thing a woman can do is to have a child.” “Well, you’re wrong!” she yelled back. Degrading treatment only made her more determined: “I have resisted all my life!” In the end adversity became a creative advantage by deciding that “since I was not a male, I could paint whatever I wanted to paint. I declared my freedom from anything but my own imagination.”
When her husband Michael Ferris, a talented toy designer and champion of her work, unexpectedly passed away in 2000, tragedy became a deep touch point for the expression of unrelenting grief. “It wasn’t until later that I found out that my work was about grief. There are all kinds of grief.”5 Her women in Lily (2001) and Making Pond (2006) produce an endless stream of tears. Life-giving rain was rare in New Mexico, which is why for Eleanor the water of tears symbolizes the substance for renewed life. This is similar to the way that the Catholic religion sees the spilling of the blood of Christ as the sacrifice that, according to the faith, symbolically redeemed mankind.
For Eleanor, religion is myth and taking control of the narrative is why she likes to “make up my own myths.” It is women who are the ones who symbolically renew life through their suffering and sacrifice. They abide with anguish and torment in order to protect nature, life and hope, enduring a “suffering she must bear in order to go forward.” In Fecundity (2013), birds surrealistically burrow into the body of the female protagonist, making holes that seem to ravage its corporal integrity. Like Shallow Waters, the central figure is also protecting swans and pools of water while precariously balanced on legs made of sticks. She is the ancient figure of “the goddess” as protector of life and nature. But she is reborn in the present, trying to shelter the hapless birds against an oncoming tornado—a symbol of our current climate disaster crisis. She seems barely able to hold her own against ominous forces of destruction. In The Flood (2024-25), a woman’s luminous naked body is rendered bright aqueous blue with her head replaced by a Medusa-like assortment of bird heads springing from her neck. She is a luminous container of life-giving water, collecting together and protecting the birds from the flood and storm that threaten everywhere. In Persephone (2025), the mythical goddess emerges from Hades to bring the renewal of spring. But against expectations she emerges burned black as charcoal because “she’s been in hell for a long time.” The effulgent flowers she is holding as a harbinger of spring stand in ironic contrast to her crouching immolated figure.
One of the most extraordinary images in the exhibit, Listening (2013), depicts a woman’s head impaled on a branch. Her head is populated by a swarm of different bird species. Each pops out of its burrowed hole, poking out in different directions and creating the impression of irrational thoughts bursting from where they are hidden. It feels as though the woman’s head can barely control the intensity of the experience, even as she intently tries to listen to so many “voices” that are exploding from her mind and even as there is the possibility that her mind might fall apart altogether. Perhaps she feels responsible for keeping the chaotic brood together, even at the cost of her own rationality. Or perhaps they represent repressed thoughts that are being released in an uncontrolled outburst. The profound ambiguity of this image makes Listening one of the most unforgettable paintings in the entire exhibit.
Signs of happiness come hard for Eleanor’s women. The trace of a smile appears in Ophelia’s Dream (2024) on the lips of the Shakespearian heroine who drifts sleepily on the water among brambles and moon flowers. “She is unaware that she is already dead” but at least her dreams provide her a refuge from the tragic truth. In Before the Storm (2024) a female figure dressed in an ebullient white and blue costume embraces a fluttering yellow bird coming in for protection from the storm outside. Knowing eyes and the trace of a smile on her lips express a sense of warmth and human connection with the little creature as it animatedly moves from the window to her shoulder. It is a rare moment of human contact with loving purpose. The aliveness and animation of the small yellow bird stands in contrast to the more static presence of small birds in her other works.
Spiess-Ferris often slips in details that play against expectations of what is socially decent or acceptable, mocking the idea of the “pretty picture” and the lie that life, especially for women, is beautiful or serene. Yet it seems that so long as paradise is denied her, one might as well make some mischief while life is here. If vitality cannot be joy then let there be vital mischief. There is erotically transgressive humor in the female genitals and breasts that are part of the clothing that a number of her characters “wear.” Many of the artist’s playful troublemakers are clowns or “peccadillos” and devils intent on mayhem, often accompanied by Muertes, skeletons in suits, as a direct inspiration from the “Death Cart” skeleton that impressed her as a child.
Her images of women can at times be wildly chaotic and playful, particularly in early works like Log Horse (1984). In later works her female protagonist often becomes a sad, suffering figure, wearing a mask of stoicism to endure precarious circumstances that clearly take no account of her own safety or needs. The nature settings and interior spaces that stage her dramas present an invented world that is nearly hypnotic in its precision and detail, confirming the intensity of its “surreal” reality. They have a kind of poisonous charm in their beauty and playfulness, lending to them a sensibility of both richness and dross.
The sexualized female body is often rendered with a mischievous sense of the grotesque, a way of asserting itself against male sexual objectification, while at times being rendered with a sly cartoonishness that enhances and expresses the drama of her performance. There are witty attenuations, punctures, and contortions in the body, sometimes crowned with a bouquet of birds’ heads where her own head should be. One of the women in Log Horse has fallen down and come apart at the seams, exposing her skin as a shell rapped around emptiness. Are all the women really hollow inside? The beautiful woman might be a trap that hides menace. The Mermaid (2021) portrays a bewitching naked woman that hides half of her monstrous self just below the waves, ready to devour the many sailors she attracts, implied by the pile of skulls accumulated beneath her. The moonflowers in Drinking the Moon (2021) are lovely but poisonous. Dangerous monsters and creepy crawlers lurk in the water in paintings like The Trap (2021), The Innocent, The Wound (2022), and The Mermaid. In such a hostile world, it is no wonder that at times a protective transgressive anger bursts through the narrative or even the body itself. In some works, this is externally expressed by swans with glaring eyes and gnashing teeth, being “there to protect the women, and to be protected.”
By piecing together her inner world based on the esoteric memories and conflicts of the past, Spiess-Ferris found a way of speaking her inner truth, often on a surreal even subconscious level. Her work has become newly relevant as a reaction to the ugly specter of environmental destruction and misogyny that are on the rise again in the United States and globally. Being raised in a time before Simone de Beauvoir’s book The Second Sex and Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique had sparked the Feminist movement, Speiss-Ferris was a woman trying to existentially affirm her identity and experience at a time when society had no place or words for them. “The woman’s movement created the chance for this woman’s voice to be heard—for this I am grateful, but I’m also grateful to the men that have given me a leg up when there were few opportunities to exhibit my vision, and who urged me to continue.” That vision of self-invention was a no small achievement, combining intensely lived experiences with imagination to express the equivocal struggles that impacted her life. In a patriarchal conservative world full of traps, barriers and dangers, she created the visual and subconscious language she needed in her art to express her truth, sometimes with playful transgressive humor, and at other times with, darkness, anger and grief. With determination, Eleanor Spiess-Ferris devoted herself to the narratives she needed to invent for herself as an artist and a woman in charge of her own image and life.
Diane Thodos is an artist and art critic who lives in Evanston, IL. She is a Pollack-Krasner Foundation Grant Recipient who exhibits internationally. Her work is in the collections of the Milwaukee Art Museum, the National Hellenic Museum, the Smart Museum of Art at the University of Chicago, the Block Museum at Northwestern University, and the Illinois Holocaust Museum among many others. For more information and to read more of her published art writing visit dianethodos.com.
All quotes are from an interview between Diane Thodos and Eleanor Spiess-Ferris from September 2, 2025 unless otherwise indicated.
Footnotes:
1. Eager to know podcast, Ricky McEachern interview with Eleanor Speiss-Ferris E016 September 21, 2020 https://www.rickymceachernartist.com/eagertoknow/061-eleanor
3. Meet Eleanor Spiess-Ferris, visual artist, voyage, Chicago, April 17, 2018. https://voyagechicago.com/interview/meet-eleanor-spiess-ferris-visual-artist-rogers-park/
4. Eager to know podcast
5. Ibid
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