In 2003, semi-retired Unity Minister and former critical care R.N. Ellie Harold, age 52, spent 3 sleepless nights listening to an inner whisper over and over, "Do Art, Do ART, DO ART!" She responded to the call by purchasing art supplies which, because she had no particular interest in painting, she placed in a corner of her home in the Atlanta area. The easel, canvas, and paint sat there for six months until one day she spied some orange tiger lilies and blue asters in her garden. She plucked the flowers and painted them and has since then created upwards of a thousand paintings, teaching herself the skill of painting with oils. For ten years, until 2012, Ellie made hundreds of paintings, primarily representational still life and plein air landscape oil paintings. In 2009 she was selected to serve as Artist in Residence at Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore, Empire, MI and, again, in 2011 at the Glen Arbor Art Association. After moving to Michigan full time in 2010, however, she began exploring abstraction, and subsequently won entry with these paintings into regional and national juried shows, including the 2015 Prince Street Gallery National exhibition in New York City. With a strong interest in public art, Ellie mounted two large solo exhibits at Michigan Medicine's Gifts of Art in 2017 and 2020. in 2017 Ellie conceived of and began creating BIRDS FLY IN: A Human Refuge, a multimedia installation inspired by migration issues at the U.S./Mexican border. The exhibit was launched in the U.S. August, 2020 at the Oliver Art Center, Frankfort, MI and spent 4 months at the Dennos Museum in Traverse City in the fall of 2021. Through the U.S. State Department's Art in Embassies Program, four of her paintings were selected to show at the American Embassy in Bratislava, Slovakia from 2020-2022 and a further loan to the U.S. Embassy in Kyrgyzstan is underway. In addition to maintaining a blog, Ellie has authored 7 Habits of Deeply Fulfilled Artists: Your Aesthetic Needs & How to Meet Them (2012) and Where Two or More Are Gathered: A New Church for the 21st Century (2000). Her most recent book is a memoir, Monet, Mitchell & Me: A Painter's Pilgrimage, that chronicles her 2022 trip to Paris and Normandy, France.