I named my website ElleCoyote Art after a powerful moment many years ago, when I saw a coyote standing calmly by the side of the road. She felt like a sacred presence—my spirit animal. I sensed she was female, so I added Elle, which is not only part of my own name, Ellen, but also the French word for “she.” Though my roots are mostly Irish with a bit of French, the French language has always had a place in my life. I heard it growing up, studied it in high school, and have been lucky enough to visit France twice (so far).

My great-grandfather worked in the lumber business in northern Wisconsin, and I spent many childhood days at a small lake where he and his crew built two large log cabins in the early 1900s. The surrounding forest was my refuge. I spent hours among the trees, listening to birdsong, watching red squirrels, and feeling the buzzing of dragonflies in the air. The lake water, dark with pine tannins, shimmered like root beer against the rocky shore.

Nature, myth, and spirit have always been part of my path. Though I don’t belong to any religion, I respect them all. I’m drawn to magic, fairies, alchemy, and the timeless pull of the natural world.

For many years, I painted what I could see—especially light filtering through trees—bringing scenes to life with color, line, and movement. Much of my inspiration came from my home state of Wisconsin and its vivid seasonal changes. You can find these works on my earlier blogs: ElleCoyote 1991–2014, ElleCoyote iPad Drawings, and iPad Landscapes.

Eventually, though, I felt something was missing. I wanted to paint what I felt inside—to express the energies and rhythms behind the physical world. That led me to explore symbolic shapes, dreamlike imagery, and mythologized portraits of friends and family. These can be found on my blog ElleCoyote Symbolic Paintings.

In the past few years, I’ve moved into abstract work—because I felt that sometimes only abstraction can hold the complexity of feeling. Recently, however, representation has reappeared in my series on the Ogham Tree Alphabet. I use Procreate to sketch some of my ideas on my iPad (you’ll find some of them on ElleCoyote Abstract iPad), then bring them to life in acrylic. I use acrylic paint partly for its lack of fumes, and partly because I’m impatient! I incorporate collage using hand-painted and gel-printed papers, and add texture and movement with stencils and layered patterns—so that each painting offers something new to discover.

If you’d like a peek into my process, I share fun flip-throughs of my sketchbooks on my YouTube channel, ElleCoyote Art. I’m thrilled to share this recent work with you. Everything you see on this site is from the past few years. To look back at somewhat less recent work, or to follow along with works in progress, visit my blog ElleCoyote Process.