At her easel, Spokane artist Elsie Stewart methodically paint some of her recent favorite subjects trees.

I started doing trees because it's so, they're so human like, you know, and I can express a lot through trees.

Some people can see it as being a, personification.

A lot of people don't see it.

They just see it as a tree.

Born and raised in Michigan to Lewis and Charlotte Dodd, Elsie quickly realized she had a passion for the arts, with both parents being artistic.

They raised their children in a household that celebrated that.

My mother, she played violin, and in her younger days she tap danced with her sister.

My dad was an artist.

He'd encourage me and and the rest of my siblings and we all, we all became artists, actually.

Or musicians.

Elsie, after pursuing an education in art, hitchhiked and settled in Spokane in the early 1970s, bringing with her an artistic sensibility that has grown through the years since beginning her career as an artist in the late 1960s.

Elsie, also known as E.L., began using her initials to identify herself so she wouldn't highlight her gender.

I found that if I used my initials, it worked a lot better for me for getting into any kind of a show, you know, as long as I kept my gender a secret and it served me well and I just kept with it all these years.

I started out with crayons, of course, but, my dad gave me an oil set when I was probably about 12.

My dad was a wonderful man.

My dad was a figure painter.

So we had we had nudes all over the house.

I mean, they were everywhere.

And I started doing figure.

You know, my dad instilled a real love of of art and in figure painting for me.

I just think it's great and I'll always keep it.

I carry it on.

I've always painted dark.

Kind of dark because I think it's because my dad always painted dark.

And that's just the way I learned to do it.

And now I'm trying to lighten things up a little bit.

So I've been using some some of these, you know, oranges and blues things together and I rather like it.

We'll see what I'm doing next week.

I don't know.

When Elsie paints, she rarely uses lines.

When she begins her paintings by using her gift of intuition as a guide.

She frequently creates images on the canvas, freeform, making decisions as she goes.

There's times where I just have to paint something out and paint something else in and the painting evolves.

Yeah, like the, like the painting up there.

It started out as a a dog chasing a rabbit through a garden was my initial idea.

Now it's called crow.

And I love it when people when people really see it and can see something in it that makes a connection with them.

That's very important to me.

Very important.

I put a lot of a lot of passion and a lot of emotion.

Into it because.

It just fires me up so much.

But I know that doing art is something, something beautiful.

In that there's people that can see it for the for the life giving essence that it has.

And I'm just really pleased to be able to to do that well and to, to just, have my work appreciated and lived with and loved, you know, and held in esteem.