Ella Grace Cooke Shines Her Star at the Village Gallery of Local Artists
The featured artist at the Village Gallery of Local Artists’ First Friday March Art Walk, Ella Grace Cooke, is a watercolor artist who is propelled by spiritual inspiration and imagination. She is excited to show her latest works on March 6th when she and her fellow artists at the Village Gallery will serve refreshments and enjoy engaging with visitors from 5-8pm. The monthly event is free to the public.
Ella Grace is a native of Boston, Massachusetts where she grew up surrounded by the hustle of big city life, so it was no surprise that she was visited in her nightly dreams by vivid, colorful images. Driven by a desire to share her visions with friends and the public, she undertook an intense journey of self-education in various artistic media, eventually finding watercolor to be a perfect fit for her plans. In 2016, “guided by my intuition,” Ella moved from Boston to Sedona, Arizona to pursue her passion for art.
The result of Ella Grace’s self-taught artistic immersion has resulted in a unique style which falls somewhere on the spectrum between Minimalism with all of its whimsical delights, architectural structure and monochromatic color schemes -and the less rigid, anything goes light and bright colors and outdoor settings of Impressionism she has found in Red Rock Country. Her career experience as a pediatric nurse is also evident in her refreshing, child-like freedom of expression.
The artist’s watercolor and mixed media pieces currently on display in the Village Gallery range from an eclectic mix of Sedona-themed magnets, all-occasion cards and small 4 inch framed colorful sprite-like watercolor figures which invoke her love of the area in both image and print: “Shine Your Star in Sedona,” and “Love Grows in Sedona.” In several new works, she has used mixed media on canvas to portray playfully surrealistic animals that surely visited her in dreams. In short, the work of Ella Grace Cooke is squarely focused on the artist’s primary goal: “I continue to follow my dreams and encourage others to do the same.”
