Ellis O'Connor: The Artist's Journey

September 2, 2025
Contemporary Scottish landscape artist Ellis O'Connor talks about her start in the world of art.
 

 

SUMMARY

Ellis O’Connor explains that her connection to art has been lifelong and instinctive rather than sparked by a single event. From a very young age, she felt an intrinsic need to create and express herself, a drive she now understands as tied to her neurodivergence and hyperfocus. She recalls making marks and creating obsessively as a child, seeing art as a natural extension of who she is. While she also enjoys music and singing, painting gives her the deepest sense of meaning, meditation, and emotional grounding. For O’Connor, artistic talent comes from love, passion, and persistence rather than innate skill, it develops because creating feels essential and inevitable.
 
 

TRANSCRIPT

I've always been interested in art. I think for me, it's always been a thing from a very young age. So, I don't really feel like there's been one specific thing that's got me engaged. It's just been this intrinsic need to create and express myself and to be curious about the world around me. It's never been one specific thing. It's just been a way of being ever since I was very young.

 

I think I discovered I had a creative talent because I was so in pursuit of doing that and expressing and creating. I had a conversation with my mom last year because I was going through the process of being diagnosed as autistic, and one of the things that we spoke about was how when I was as young as three, I would be furiously mark-making, expressing myself really young, and that I had that hyperfocus, that intrinsic need to create from a very young age.

 

So I think it goes hand in hand. I think I've not really had any choice in the matter of knowing what I wanted to do. It was just this feeling of like—that is what I have to do. I couldn't imagine doing anything else. And so I think when you really love what you do and you're so passionate about it, and you've got that intrinsic feeling from a young age, then the talent goes hand in hand because it's what you love to do anyway.

 

I think it was also a big part of being in school and naturally really enjoying it. I think you become very good at something when you're interested in it and you want to pursue it all the time. I don't think it's necessarily that people are talented right away; it's more that they just have something within them that they know is what they need to do, and then it grows and grows over time because they want to make the time for it.

 

I think it manifests itself in art because that again was what I was always drawn to doing. I am a very creative person in general. I love to play the guitar, I love to sing, I like music and things like that. But in terms of something that just draws me right in, makes me have a deeper sense of meaning, gives me almost like a form of meditation, therapy, all these different things, it's always been painting.

 

And again, it doesn't feel like it's been a choice of “that's what I'm going to do.” It's just felt like that's all I had the capacity to do. That's all I wanted to do. So the drive has always been there from very young.