I began painting in early childhood purely for fun, never considering becoming an “artist.” My artwork started drawing attention in grade schook, and I won a Maryland state award in the sixth grade for a safety poster that I created. I still didn’t think I had talent. I just loved drawing and painting and looking and studying paintings by master artists.

At age 15, I was surprised to have a fellow art class student request to purchase my very first oil painting, an imaginary moonlit marsh scene with a rowboat abandoned in the foreground. (I still wonder where it is now.)

Though I’ve taken several sidetracks into other careers, mostly involving writing, my paintings have been drawing a strong following ever since.

There were countless town fairs and art shows, and while my hopes of being "discovered" overnight didn't happen, as the new millennium dawned I was being called one of the East Coast’s most collectible artists.

My paintings, drawings and limited edition prints could by the 1990s be found in homes, private and government collections throughout the United States, with a few finding their way abroad. More than 100 galleries represented my work by then. In 1999 I started what was to become one of the most successful art galleries its size in the country, all from a small, quiet, coastal town in Delaware, my home state since a teen.

At that point sales of my work had reached more than a quarter million dollars a year with most of my new originals selling before they were completed. I felt like I was dreaming and tried not to think about it for fear of bursting the bubble, instead saying quiet prayers of gratitude.

It didn’t happen as quickly as all that sounds.

I began working as an artist seriously, professionally, accepting commissions for portraits of people, pets and horses in the 1970s, while also painting landscapes and seascapes, illustrating local magazine covers with pen & inks of historic scenes, creating paintings and prints or fund-raising projects and illustrating religious articles for a weekly Delaware newspaper.



The illustrations led to a side career in journalism, photojournalism, and design, all of which I tackled with the same love and fervor with which I’d tackled my self-taught art. Each piece I wrote, each photograph I took or illustration I created was a new learning experience as I strove to improve my skills, while, more importantly, seeking spiritual direction.

Within several years, the result of my efforts brought in eight Maryland-Delaware-DC Press Association first and second place awards, competing mostly against college educated journalists and editors working at 65 regional newspapers. I was named an “Outstanding Female Role Model in Journalism” by the American Federation of Women’s Clubs, and then garnered more than 60 “Best of Chesapeake” awards for news coverage, feature writing, newspaper design, photography and even won a humor category for writing about a pelican that somehow wound up with its feet frozen to a roadside puddle in Delaware during an ice storm. A six-part series about alcohol and drug abuse that I wrote and illustrated brought in a Maryland-Delaware-DC Press Assoc. award and a citation from the Delaware Bureau on Alcohol Abuse.

In those days I went back and forth between writing and painting. I’d become fairly well known for my art by then, despite the long hours I worked as a journalist, and when my followers complained that I’d laid aside my brushes for writing, I explained that both careers required the same basic skills: observation and expression and that I hadn’t left anything behind.

I loved knowing that my writing could bring about positive changes within a community just as I loved opening eyes to the beauty and the good around us with my paintings.

In the mid-1980s, I left my post as associate editor of The Leader  to freelance as an artist, photographer, writer and designer.

Within two days, I was asked to help an acquaintance launch a new magazine in Ocean City, Maryland, Ocean City, The Magazine for Resort Living, serving as founding editor, writer, photographer, and graphic designer under title executive editor.

When the magazine got established, I left it to return to my artwork full time, now with the understanding that several decades of life experience and constant study of the Bible and its history can lend.

It was at this point that a sequence of life-altering circumstances began, prompted by prayer and enabled by an unlikely project I’d been doing research on for 15 years. When completed, Treasure Beaches of the Mid-Atlantic drew national attention and sales far and wide. More successes followed and soon I was praying my way through opening my art gallery.

I felt I finally understood the purpose of my work, no matter the form it took.

Today, my work can be found in 18 countries  on four continents in homes and offices and in private, government and corporate collections. The gallery received a number of awards, the last being named one of “10 Must See Galleries and Museums in Delaware” by The Culture Trip, an international cultural review group. But what does this really mean?

My most meaningful work is a series that wasn't intended to be a series, started from a vision that came to me in prayer and released just before I opened my gallery, with someone buying the original oil painting from a description she read. The sale paid the first year's gallery expenses. The Strength of Woman Series has now reached in print form from Alaska to South Africa to the northernmost territory of Australia and across the pond to Europe.

I remember praying as a young girl that my life would be a blessing. A long time ago I asked that God use me, my work, in whatever way was needed.

That remains my hope. Poet Helen Steiner Rice (no relation) once said we can’t change the whole world, but we can “brighten the corner where we are” and that our efforts will in turn ripple and brighten the rest of the world.

It’s my hope that whatever I do, in whatever corners of the world my work is found, it brightens and uplifts.

Ellen