March Artist Spotlight
Meet Johan Ellefsen
Johan S. Ellefsen is a landscape artist and works in an impressionist style, capturing fleeting moments and atmospheric light with loose brushstrokes. He also illustrates children’s books; and, as a writer, he delves into topics such as the meaning of Prehistoric art. He is originally from Bolivia and now lives in Wellesley.
Tell us a little about how you started painting
Painting came to me by chance. I began painting in my early 20s at a time I started law school and writing my first essays about Ancient Greece. You could say that it was a desire to fill a blank canvas. My first painting came as an afterthought. The idea first arose following a conversation with my father – one of those fine days we embarked in meandering discussions about art, history, ancient civilizations, oriental rugs or whatever topic our curiosity fancied about that day. I remember saying that it was unlikely for me to have the ability to make a rug or have the means to discover an ancient ruin, but I could certainly do a painting. My father took my word for it and challenged me to make a painting after a photograph he had. The photo of a large Cumulonimbus cloud looming over a sailboat – the calm before the storm – was definitely a challenge.
The process of making that first painting thought me a lot about how to tackle a project I have never done before. It took patience and a lot of observation. At first, I was unable to capture the atmosphere of the picture, putting a lot of color and texture into the canvas to the verge of ruining the painting. I had to leave the painting to rest. But then, obsessed with the project, I intensely began observing clouds and other paintings, until I could close my eyes and visualize what I wanted. After adding some layers of paint, the apparent mistakes of prior days became the traces and nuances emerging from beneath the clouds. Oil paint is a forgiving medium. I knew then that I was hooked on art for life. The hallmarks of that first painting are still visible in my current work: the temperamental nature of water and the physical texture of oil paints. After almost thirty years of making art, I still consider my first painting one of my best works.
Tell us a little about your background
Over the years, art has accompanied me around the world. Living in Paris, I spent hours drawing the sculptures at the Louvre. While in Bolivia, I depicted the mountains, and in Western New York and New England the changing seasons. Art has given me a unique perspective of the world, one that otherwise I would have missed altogether.
I am an Exhibiting Member of the Wellesley Society of Artists since 2023 and regularly exhibit my work in the Annual Library Shows. My first exhibition was in 2006 in the library of the Lycée International de Saint-Germain-en-Laye, France, where I showed a series of drawings from sculptures from the Louvre Museum. In 2021, I exhibited my oil paintings in the Nemacolin Resort in Pennsylvania. In December 2024, I obtained the Yale Nicolls Award for Best Interpretation of the Natural World with the painting “Canadaway Creek.” More recently, in January 2025 my work was exhibited in the Foyer of the Wellesley Free Library.
What motivates you to paint?
For me, art is a unique and powerful medium to express ideas and emotions, many of which cannot be truly expressed in words. The aesthetic appreciation of an image is simply a component of art, not the reason for its existence. I like to reflect on the shared experience of art, both as a painter and as an arts writer. I see my art as a dialogue rather than a representation of reality. My paintings are a conversation with the artists that inspired me as well as a moment in my life. Admittedly, many times my hand proves to have a mind of its own –assertive and opinionated. The resulting painting is the record of that dialogue.
I believe that art doesn’t want to charm you. It wants to possess you. To do this, art needs to access your mind by means of emotions. I am always fascinated with listening to people and finding out how a particular work of art resonates with their individual experiences. If effective, art casts a spell that takes our imagination to an unworldly place. Artists paint the visible to attain the invisible.
Collage is my favorite art medium. An artist once described “the essence of collage as an exuberant response to the use of paper.” In the past, art images of pasted papers were called “papiers colles” eventually evolving into the term collage. To me, collage is this exciting, spontaneous process where images come to life. There is a freedom and energy involved with the tearing and cutting of paper into shapes. With a whimsical point of view, I imagine and create motifs and themes of landscapes, animals (especially chickens), plants and flowers with bits of paper, and at times, adding fabric, threads, wire or anything that I can glue onto a surface.
Born and raised in RI, a beautiful state (“the Ocean state”), I spent many days on the water with my father, and later my step father, both passionate sailors. The open water and sky, along with every summer spent up island on Martha’s Vineyard, gave me my love for water, sand, dunes and boats. This is the primary reason why my work centers on these elements. My happy place has always been the Vineyard; and the places that ground me and reach my soul are being on a boat in the open ocean; and on the beach with majestic dunes. Most of my paintings are of the Vineyard, since it brings me such a sense of peace and beauty, and connectedness of childhood memories with family and friends, though Ive been known to also paint winding forest paths as well as open fields! 
When I was a little kid, I spent many hours drawing little stick figures, making paper dolls with large elaborate wardrobes, went through a long obsession of drawing horses, also building dioramas in my bedroom from models of dinosaur skeletons lit with flashlights. (Installations!) I took paints outdoors and painted landscapes. When I was about 12, my parents were kind enough to send me to Saturday morning painting classes at the Everson Museum in downtown Syracuse, where we would go out into the city, draw what we saw, and bring them back to class to paint. I continued with classes at the Museum throughout high school, mostly still life and portrait drawing.
