Ellen Globokar grew up in western Michigan with a pencil and a sketchpad usually close at hand. As a teenager, she was commissioned to draw portraits. While attending Grand Valley State University, she displayed and sold her watercolors at juried art shows. Although Ellen always thought she would become a professional artist, her love of politics and government took her in a different direction. For more than twenty years Ellen ran political campaigns, worked for the Governor of Michigan, spent six years on Capitol Hill as a Chief of Staff to a U.S. Senator, was the Political Director for the largest union, and served as Vice-President for an environmental organization.

In 1989, after returning from a month in Czechoslovakia, assisting President Vaclav Havel as he formed his new government and working with political activists and artists, Ellen made a resolution that she would return to the study of art and enrolled in a class at The Art League of Alexandria. For the next fifteen years, while continuing her work in politics, she would study landscape and figure painting with Rick Weaver, alla prima painting (wet-on-wet) with Danni Dawson, still life, figure, and landscape with Diane Tesler, as well as study photography, abstract art, and plein-air painting.

She continued painting in pastels and oils after leaving politics and becoming a stay-at-home mom in Chevy Chase, MD. Ellen displayed her paintings at the Peninsula Art Gallery in Lewes, DE, where she has a second home, for several years. Her two shows at the gallery which featured landscape and figurative beach scenes were highly successful. She was also the featured artist at Bebee Hospital’s Best of the Beach Auction in Lewes. Ellen has been accepted into numerous juried exhibits at the Art League Gallery in Alexandria, Virginia, including winning “Best in Show.””

Two years ago, Ellen began making collages, after becoming frustrated searching for large pieces of art for her home. What began as an experiment, using different kinds of papers, paints and dyes, resulted in a 5 by 7 foot triptych. “I had every intention of returning to oils after I completed the work, but the next morning I started another one. I couldn’t stop,” she said. “And as long as I am inspired, I will keep creating them.”