Coffee with Friends Painting

B.1971 Nairobi, Kenya. Ella is a painter who investigates her own experiences of the world. Her semi-abstract paintings incorporate a love of colour and pattern, absorbing and interpreting her surroundings she treads a fine line between representation and abstraction with the aim of sparking the viewer’s curiosity and igniting their imagination. Ella’s new paintings centre around the home, personal connections to treasured objects and interior spaces: A kind of magic realism with heightened colours and shapes which blur the boundaries between what is real and what is fiction. ‘Sometimes I’m remembering the moonlight pouring over the kitchen table in the early hours, its unworldly light changing the colours of everything in the room. Sometimes I’m sensing into the joy of connecting with people and sometimes a painting is born out of almost complete fiction, it becomes itself without too much thinking, it just is.’ Ella has exhibited widely in the U.K. Her work is held by collectors in the U.S. Canada, Australia, the Middle East, Europe and in the U.K.