ellis d.

I grew up between two very different but equally important forces.

My mom gave me drive, resilience, discipline, and the kind of strength that taught me how to keep moving even when life became heavy. She showed me what endurance looks like - how to build, how to survive, how to continue creating a life for yourself even after disappointment, heartbreak, or uncertainty. She made me believe I was capable of becoming something larger than my fear.

My dad gave me the creative side of myself — imagination, emotion, humor, storytelling, and the instinct to romanticize the world a little. He taught me to notice beauty in strange places, to pay attention to texture, silence, longing, grief, and light. He made me believe even painful things could become meaningful when transformed into art. Together, they shaped not only the way I create, but the way I survive.

Art has always been a private language for me. A place to put the feelings that felt too consuming, too tender, too complicated to survive anywhere else. This is not the first time I've transformed heartbreak, memory, love, grief, or longing into something tangible, but it is the first time I've allowed those pieces to be witnessed fully.

I became more serious about painting during one of the most transformative periods of my life — a season marked equally by loss and rebirth. While heartbreak shaped much of the emotional landscape behind the work, joy shaped it too. Painting became the place where I found myself returning slowly back to life. A place where softness survived. A place where beauty still existed after ruin.

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and it is With endless gratitude to Melissa Vida of VidaMagic for creating spaces where vulnerability feels sacred, transformation feels possible, and artists like me are reminded that softness was never something to hide.