Shattered Window (2018) Painting by J S Ellington

I am a native West Texan. My life began with a very linear-logical interest in science and what it can seem to prove. In my twenties, I attended The University of Texas at Austin and earned a degree in pharmacy.

During an ensuing 37-year career as a pharmacist, it slowly began to dawn on me that you can't put God in a test tube. I started turning more toward creative endeavors to find meaning.

I had painted all my life because my mother and her sisters always painted when I was growing up, and I did too. My Aunt Patsy Dolliver spent the most time with me, instilling a passion for art and teaching me to paint as we went. I decided to do my best to apply the" let go and let God" to find out what could express through me as art after I retired from pharmacy.

In the past, I had hurriedly and halfheartedly painted, but I took it up again with more surrender and curiosity, and without the feeling of having to rush (without a job taking up so much time).

I became a resident artist at Studio 13 in Abilene, which is a community of resident artists and associate artists whom I love and admire. My new art interests have afforded me a sense of direction, belonging, passion, and satisfaction that I have not previously known.

I feel that I am able to get my personality out of the way most of the time and let the paintings kind of come to be on their own. I don't "know" how to paint. I feel my way into and through each project. There is great satisfaction in getting to participate in that process. I enjoy realism, surrealism, and abstract art--basically anything to do with color.

On August 6, 2018, my Aunt Patsy Dolliver passed away. She signed her paintings "von." That is the first part of our family name, von Roeder. For the rest of my life, I will place von somewhere in each painting to ackowledge the crucial part she played in my passion for art. "A Shady Country Road" and "A Place to Contemplate Memories" are the first into which I added "von."

• Nationality: UNITED STATES
• Date of birth : 1948
• Artistic domains:
• Groups: Contemporary American Artists