Welcome to ElleCoyote Art

I named my website ElleCoyote Art because I had a very special experience when I saw a coyote on the side of the road many years ago. I felt she was my sacred animal spirit. Because I thought her as female, I added “elle”, which is part of my name, and also the French word for “she”. My ethnic heritage is mostly Irish and a little French. I heard French growing up, studied French in high school, and I have visited France twice (so far).

My great grandfather was in the lumber business in northern Wisconsin, and I spent a lot of time 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 alone with the trees, watching the red squirrels and hearing the birds. There were lots of dragonflies buzzing around and the water lapped against the rocky shore. Tannin from the pines tinted the glacial lake the color of root beer.

I respect all religions and belong to none. I have always been drawn to magic, fairies, myths, alchemy, and the natural world. For many years, I painted what I could see, especially light through trees, and made it come to life with colors, lines and shapes that created movement. I was deeply inspired by my home state of Wisconsin, with its fall colors.

I painted landscapes and interiors for many years, and you can see some of those paintings, both physical and digital, on my blogs, ElleCoyote 1994 - 2014, ElleCoyote iPad Drawings, and iPad Landscapes. But something was missing. I wanted to paint what I felt inside me, to express a sense of the energies that create the physical world. For a time, I painted symbolic shapes, dream images, and mythologized portraits of friends and family; these symbolic works can be seen in my blog ElleCoyote Symbolic Paintings. Recently I began creating abstract paintings, because nothing else expresses my inner feelings. I worked out a lot of abstract and geometric sketches on my iPad, which are featured on my blog EllCoyote Abstract iPad.

I work in acrylic, partly because there are no fumes, and partly because I am impatient. I add collage with hand-painted and gel-printed papers, as well as using stencils to add pattern to my work, so that the entire painting offers something to look at.

You can watch some fun flip-through videos of my sketchbooks on my YouTube channel, which is titled (you guessed it) ElleCoyote Art.

I am excited to share these paintings with you. What you see on this site is work I have done in the past few years. You can also visit my older work, as well as works in progress, on my blog ElleCoyote Process.

--Ellen McCormick Martens