About Elly

A lady who owned one of my landscapes kept it in her bedroom. She was very poorly at the time, confined to her bed, and one day she said to me that she would look at the painting and it made her happy. For a while she forgot the pain. That is the reason I paint. The painting itself was nothing special, in fact I look at it now in despair, but I know it served its purpose and I'm glad.

I have been painting for about 40 years and I am self taught. I started my career as a portraitist on commission but in the last 15 years I expanded into figurative realism, still life and landscape. More recently, as a mother of two young adult girls I became more and more aware of the unique difficulties this modern world presents to them. My new collection which I began in 2020 are based on the girls who are growing up and finding their way in a world that on the one hand offers them the choice and freedom I never had but also presents them with a precarious and frightening future which bewilders and angers them. This is what I want to express in my paintings: two young women who face a life where the earth is dying, our leaders are puppets, wars and injustice abounds. Images of how they should look assail them relentlessly. The result for my girls and their peers is mental anguish, fear of not fitting in and while they are educated, informed and strong they are unsure and frightened of the future.

Although I use my daughters as inspiration there is no likeness as it is not just about them, it’s about all young peoples’ experience. Apart from the faces and poses all other aspects of my paintings are from my imagination and evolve organically as I paint. 

I work exclusively in oil. The background textures are taken from photographs I take of leaves, flowers or fabrics often in a state of decay and decomposition while the figure remains impermeable and defiant facing the world with hope and resolve.