Since Ellen has traveled and lived throughout the United States while growing up in an Air Force family, she has settled on landscapes as a favorite subject in her paintings. She does digress though by painting her daughter’s chickens, various doorways, still life and abstract art. Ellen was a nontraditional college student since she had three children while earning a degree in Art Education from the University of Maine in Orono, Maine. After graduating she taught elementary and middle school art in Bucksport, Maine for 24 years.

At the elementary and middle schools in Maine Ellen helped bring five Maine artists’ large indoor installations of public art to the community. She taught a year of high school painting classes as well as a semester at the University of Maine. She received a Master’s degree in Art from Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, Rhode Island. Ellen continues to travel back to Maine where she has a son and grandchildren and to Ohio to visit her daughter. Ellen and her husband have eight children and twenty one grandchildren living throughout the country, so travel is essential.

After retiring from teaching, Ellen and her husband moved to California where she is now free to paint as little or as much as she wishes. She has exhibited in Maine and Northern California in galleries, restaurants, Fairs, sidewalk art shows, wineries, and local art shows.Valley Art Gallery in Walnut Creek carries her work on a continuing basis. She has won many awards and sells her paintings in various venues.

In her words: “Painting is not only a form of communication between the artist and the viewer, but allows the artist to look within…to discover the colors of the soul, the feelings that describe in a painterly way the world both inside and outside the mind. Art speaks to us in a way words cannot. It speaks without using words. It uses the lushness of paint, lines, shapes, textures, and colors to describe what we see, and to show emotions.”

Ellen feels that painting a sheep for Rio Vista’s public art project has been a fun and interesting endeavor. The bumpy texture of the sheep is a lot different than painting on a smooth canvas and was a challenge for sure. It is fun to see the unexpected sheep standing there on Main Street in town with their bright colors and designs. She is hoping the community enjoys seeing the sheep as much as she has enjoyed painting them.