About Ellen

An artist native to Mississippi, I paint full-time and maintain a part-time existence as a paramedic. On my painted surfaces I build images with oil or acrylic of the physical and psychological spaces and connections between church and tree, child and dog, blue and orange.

Whether commissioned, working from my heart in my studio, or painting on location, I am driven to communicate with layers of color and texture until each image becomes its own and I can move on. Several paintings at a time are always in progress, and I move back and forth as each piece develops at its own pace. I try to paint a playful, and often joyful, outlook on life. I have always painted and as it has become my primary work, it has become my way of storytelling.

After years away, studying and making art, it has been in returning to Mississippi that my work has found its rhythm and become highly narrative as I try to make sense of the race, class, religious, cultural, mixed up gumbo of this place. I've recently become a parent in this post-Katrina war time, and this is having a profound effect on my thoughts and my work.

Ellen's Journal

Journal pages
Now-and-then entries about painting and life.

Ellen's Educational Timeline

New York Studio School
Drawing Marathon, June 2005

Maine College of Art, Khatadin Wilderness:
Painting workshop, October 2004

University of Mississippi Medical Center:
Paramedic Certificate 1998-1999

La Escuela Sevilla, la Antigua Guatemala, 1996

San Francisco Art Institute, San Francisco, CA, 1994-1995

Colby College, Waterville, ME, 1990, BA, Religion

Studio Art Centers International, Florence, Italy, spring, 1990

Corcoran School of Art, Washington, DC, summer 1989

University of Southern Maine, Stone Coast Writers' Workshop, August 1989

University of Mississippi, Oxford, MS, 1987-1988
Studied painting under Jere Allen