About John Ellsberry's work. Ellsberry paints with stained glass. These "paintings" are grids of stained-glass squares laid out mosaic style; structurally, his work is based in computer graphics utilizing the pixel format. By using this formula Ellsberry can mine familiar territory, creating recognizable, but hallucinogenic visions of familiar images.

Ellsberry didn't develop his current technique through the rhetoric of art theory. Instead, in true Baltimore style, it began when he was working with a friend replacing stained glass transoms for doorways. The material intrigued him. He began looking for a way to use the intensely pigmented glass material to create a more realistic image.

Already a photographer and a printmaker, he was well versed in graphic arts. Early on he used a computer program to break down an image into color pixels and then match cut-glass squares, color for color. He assumed he would get the more realistic image he was looking for. It didn't quite work. The process gave Ellsberry a static, digitally skewed image, one with "stair-stepped" linear areas. He now works directly from carefully chosen black and white photos, without any computer reference. It's a long and arduous process.

In most of the artist's work, light never passes completely through the glass. Instead, the opaque background bounces light back to the viewers' eye. An efficient way to subvert projected light.

Some of Ellsberry's works, especially his early pieces bear a striking similarity to the work of Andy Warhol, an artist Ellsberry admires. Like Warhol, Ellsberry makes working-class projections: illustrative, often funny and oddly vacant.  However, unlike Warhol, Ellsberry's    is a more personal vision, often oddly somber. The artist's empathy   for his subject matter is clear but reserved.

A comparison to Chuck Close is almost inevitable, and even though Ellsberry finds Close’s work rather mesmerizing, he does not feel that he has been particularly influenced by it. To Ellsberry, the similarities between his work and Close's are obvious but superficial.

Ellsberry is, in fact, most influenced by the classic works of the impress-ionists.  The blots of light, the disappearing distorted image, the color fields achieved through high intensity complimentary colors, all these are part of the impressionist canon, and his animal portraits play more with light and color in just this impressionistic way.  Here the narrative "painting" breakdown is at its most extreme and most rewarding.