Word from the Smokies: Bryson City painter reflects on a lifetime of art inspired by nature
Elizabeth with the late George Ellison outside their home at lower Lands Creek. They placed the property under a conservation easement in 2022.
Quintin Ellison photo
Elizabeth Ellison was dealing almost strictly in watercolors when a logistical challenge transformed her painting career. It was 2013, and she was planning a one-person exhibition at the NC Arboretum in Asheville that would require to her to produce a plethora of new paintings in time for the 2017 show.
“I decided, no way am I going to do 80 new watercolors and frame them and transport them,” Elizabeth said.
Works in oil and acrylic don’t need frames, and the finished canvas is light as a feather compared to the heft of a framed watercolor. Elizabeth decided to switch mediums for the upcoming exhibition, and the change stuck. The canvases that now fill her Bryson City gallery burst with montages of color and texture that invite the viewer to step back and experience the unique quality of light, perspective or turn of the season that first inspired the artist.
Elizabeth can’t remember a time when she wasn’t an artist — nor can she remember a time when the outdoors didn’t inspire her art. “I started drawing as soon as I could hold a pencil,” she said, surrounded by years’ worth of oil, acrylic, and watercolor paintings filling the Main Street gallery that’s been her professional home since 1984. “That’s a long time.”
Farmland and woods framed Elizabeth’s world in the 1940s and ’50s as she was growing up in Caswell County, part of North Carolina’s Piedmont region. Elizabeth and her nine siblings grew up “simply” on a 125-acre farm, expected to work hard but also given space to roam, and to express their ideas and opinions. Elizabeth used this freedom to lose herself in the outdoors — and then, to translate the emotion of those moments into images on paper.
“I just wanted some way to be able to put down how I felt about being in the woods,” she said, “and I can still remember that. And so, out there on the farm, it was the perfect place for me.”
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After high school, Elizabeth enrolled in the associate of arts program at Averett College — now Averett University — 20 miles away and just over the state line in Danville, Virginia. That’s where she met George Ellison, a Danville native and high school football hero who was then enrolled, on a football scholarship, at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. In addition to becoming Elizabeth’s husband, co-creator, and best friend, George, who died in February 2023, would go on to cement a reputation as an unparalleled naturalist, historian and writer of the Great Smoky Mountains.
Elizabeth finished the two-year program at Averett, and she and George married while he was still an undergraduate. They moved around a lot during those early years. George finished college at UNC, and then the couple moved to Richmond, Virginia, where Elizabeth enrolled in fine art history courses at Richmond Professional Institute, now called Virginia Commonwealth University. From there, they went to Columbia, South Carolina, for George’s graduate school program at the University of South Carolina. Elizabeth took painting and drawing classes, but she never earned a bachelor’s degree.
Elizabeth Ellison has always derived joy from depicting the natural world through art, and she continues to do so daily in her Bryson City studio. Quintin Ellison photo
“When I started taking painting classes, I started selling, and I really didn’t want anybody to tell me how to do things,” she said. “I wanted to do it my own way.”
She and George were alike in that respect. They both knew what they loved to do, and they wanted to do it on their own terms. It was this drive that brought them to the Great Smoky Mountains in 1973 following three years in Starkville, Mississippi, where George taught graduate courses at Mississippi State University and Elizabeth studied drawing.
The Ellisons visited Western North Carolina for the first time on a trip connected to George’s research on a publication about Horace Kephart, a pivotal figure in the park’s creation. Decades later, he would co-author “ Back of Beyond: A Horace Kephart Biography,” the first definitive biography on the man.
Wandering through the park’s North Carolina side, George and Elizabeth found themselves at the boundary line, gazing into a remote cove bisected by a bubbling stream — Lands Creek. That trip proved to be a turning point in their lives, inspiring George to leave academia and focus on other forms of writing in the mountain region he was falling in love with.
Three years after moving to Swain County, the couple struck an agreement to rent the property at lower Lands Creek, moving into a small cabin that Elizabeth describes as “just a shack.” It was a primitive lifestyle — the Ellisons didn’t install electricity until well into the 1990s. They also didn’t have any homesteading skills to speak of, at least not at first.
“I’m sure the people in the county were amazed that we actually made it,” said Elizabeth, recalling how in those early years they never seemed to have enough firewood to heat with. “Because what we chose to do is what most of them wanted not to do.”
But Elizabeth found satisfaction in the primitive life — and still does.
“It would have been easy for us to go someplace and gotten jobs and all, but I just like being part of having lived my life, not just ridden through it,” she said.
The Ellisons found their calling on Lands Creek, deriving a special inspiration that they protected by purchasing the property in 1996 and placing it under a conservation easement in 2022. George carved out a name for himself as a leading voice in interpreting the region’s natural and cultural history, while Elizabeth launched a career of her own as a painter. Decades later, she still finds something magical in the way new artwork is born.
“It’s just pretty amazing to me that you can have a blank canvas, and all of a sudden you have a painting, maybe of a place that means a lot to you, but that also means a lot to a lot of people,” she said.
Elizabeth describes herself as a fast painter, able to complete an oil in three or four days — excluding drying time — whereas others using that medium may take years to finish a single work. She doesn’t paint every eyelash or blade of grass, a lean style that allows her to glide quickly across the canvas. But it’s the decades spent cultivating her artist’s eye and instinctive use of paint and color that allows her to do it at all.
‘Where Rivers Flow’ celebrates the mountain landscape of Western North Carolina that has inspired so much of Elizabeth Ellison’s work. Painting by Elizabeth Ellison
“How long did it take me to paint this painting or that painting?” she asked. “It took me 50 or 60 years, because if I had to think about every stroke, and if I hadn’t put so much information into my memory bank and developed my hand-eye coordination, I couldn’t do it.”
For most of their careers, the gallery above Clampitt’s Hardware served both as Elizabeth’s studio and George’s office. Though their art often appeared together, Elizabeth’s paintings of wildlife and wild places accompanying George’s books and newspaper columns, the parallel movement of their careers should not be confused with a tandem partnership, Elizabeth said.
“We just supported each other,” she said. “I never told him what to do or asked him to do things, and he never told me. We were just artists in our own right.”
When Parkinson’s disease caused a serious decline in George’s health, Elizabeth’s art career had to take a backseat. Caring for her husband, her “best friend,” became the top priority. Now she’s back in the studio, rediscovering the joy that comes from creating. Though her studio is well-stocked with unsold paintings from the years marked by George’s illness and the COVID-19 pandemic, often she can still be found there, brushing color on canvas.
“I’m having a good time,” she said, “like a little kid playing.”
Elizabeth’s artwork appears in the recently published Arcadia Publishing title Land of Blue Shadows: Mountain Life in Verse and View, alongside previously unpublished poetry by George Ellison and photography by their daughter Quintin Ellison. To visit her Bryson City gallery, call or text 828.788.1541. This story was originally published in the fall 2024 issue of Smokies Life Journal, a twice-yearly magazine that is the primary benefit of joining Smokies Life. To read more stories like this while supporting Great Smoky Mountains National Park, visit SmokiesLife.org/Membership and become a Park Keeper.
(Holly Kays is the lead writer for the 29,000-member Smokies Life, a nonprofit dedicated to supporting the scientific, historical, and interpretive activities of Great Smoky Mountains National Park by providing educational products and services such as this column. Reach her at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..)
