Art Ellis Supply

Posted on May 5, 2010 – 2:14 AM | by OldManFoster
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By Jackson Griffith photos by Scott Duncan

“Art is the only way to run away without leaving home,” a sign over the door tells you as you’re leaving Art Ellis Supply, a comfortably funky purveyor of artist’s and bookbinder’s materials that has been a fixture on J Street in Midtown Sacramento since 1948. It’s something Sharon Tanovitz, half of the husband-and-wife team that has owned the shop since 1976, found somewhere and decided to share. The source? “Anonymous,” she says. “The other one I’ve always wanted to do was: ‘Remember – everyone was a beginner once.'”

The latter adage might serve as a welcome for anyone, especially a neophyte artist, overwhelmed by the bewildering array of paints, papers, pencils, pastels and much more that line the walls and stuff the shelves in the front part of the shop. Actually, most of the paper, including a number of beautiful papers from Nepal, along with papyrus from Egypt, now resides in drawers in the back room, safe from indiscriminate pawing fingers. To look through them, you need to ask Sharon or Jim, her husband of 42 years, or Jim’s brother Harry.

But that hands-on help is what Art Ellis, the only independently owned and operated art supply left in the area, is all about, and there’s an accumulated body of knowledge in the shop that you won’t find at the larger chain stores. For example, one day, the store took a phone call from a flustered woman who worked for a state senator; her boss specifically had requested an Eagle 314 drafting pencil. “We were the last place on the list that she called,” Sharon remembers. “I said, ‘Sure, but you know that it’s not called that anymore.’ This little pencil started life as the Eagle 314. Well, Eagle got bought by Berol; it became the Berol Drafting 314. And then Berol got bought by Sanford, so then it became the Sanford Drafting 314. So that’s what it was at that time ….”

“Now …” Jim pipes in. Sharon finishes the story: “She told me the other places she’d called. I know they have that pencil, because it’s a basic. But nobody had been around long enough to know the history, that it was the same pencil. It’s just like a lady that got married a few times. Well, last year, Sanford decided that, since they make all these other pencils, they didn’t need the Drafting 314 anymore, so they dropped it. And there’s a lovely little pencil company down in Redwood City called General Pencil, which said, ‘Oh, we can’t have that!’ So General is now making the General Drafting 314.”

Then Jim jumps in with Berol’s “New Coke” moment: when the company tried to drop the trusty 314, “they got a massive call in from every teacher across the United States, every school district that used those pencils,” he says while Sharon snickers. “They dropped that as quick as you could imagine.”

Which is to say that the Tanovitzes know their stuff backward and forward.

Art Ellis was founded in the space at 2508 J Street by, as you might guess, a guy named Art Ellis, who, with his wife Bama, was an old-school retailer who catered to the area’s burgeoning artist community. One autumn day in 1967, Jim Tanovitz, then still a student, walked in, and Bama asked him if he needed a job. He’s been there ever since, earning an AA at City College and a BA and MA in fine arts at Sacramento State. Jim found out about the store from Sharon, whom he’d met courtesy of a friendly Doberman pinscher named Valvoline, who’d been adopted by Jim’s then-boss at a nearby garage after Jim couldn’t keep her. Valvoline befriended Sharon, whose daily path led past the garage. Today, art is Jim’s bailiwick at the store, while bookbinding is Sharon’s.

They also share a passion for vintage cars, specifically ’40s and ’50s Oldsmobiles, and Jim and Harry run a specialty parts business called Tanson Enterprises; both it, and Art Ellis Supply, can be found online at www.forwhatyouneed.com. And if you like to talk cool cars, or maybe glimpse such customers as Wayne Thiebaud, who still occasionally stops by, then consider popping in to check out Art Ellis.

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  1. One Response to “Art Ellis Supply”

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    By Elizabeth Varadan on Jun 3, 2010 | Reply

    Art Ellis does a super job of supporting young people’s interest in art. They give my after school art club (at the South Natomas Community Center) a show each spring or summer, which is a great boost to these young artist’s self-esteem. Kudos for Art Ellis!

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