For Elena Johnson, as a youngster, art was not her strong suit. In fact, she flunked out of high school art and once had a teacher tell her she didn’t have an artistic bone in her body.
“I remember we were doing pottery, and mine just kept collapsing,” Elena said. “My teacher pulled me outside, and she goes, ‘You don’t have an artistic bone in your body. You need to do something else.’”
Elena took those words to heart and went on to pursue a career in medicine, but many years later, she would prove she did in fact have a creative bone in her.
At age 15, she volunteered in an emergency room, and when she saw the paramedics come in, she thought to herself, ‘That’s what I want to do.’ At age 17, she attended an EMT school where she was certified as an emergency medical technician.
The following year, she got her first job in the medical field, and for the next 13 years, she worked in emergency medicine. But after a particularly difficult shift in 2020, everything was about to shift for her.
“I came home and I thought, ‘I need a creative outlet.’ I needed to do something that wasn’t this negative side of society,” she said. “I sat down and I sketched out a drawing of my dog, and looking back at it now, it’s mortifying, but I thought, ‘It’s not half bad.’”
That day, Elena found a passion for art she didn’t know she had. “I went out and bought a book on realistic drawing and just became obsessed.” From that point on, she was drawing everything from her family and friends to their pets.
After spending more and more time on art, she began taking on paid art projects, and art became her part-time job outside of her full-time job. Her friends and family placed orders, and with the help of social media, she landed work with police departments sketching illustrations of canines.
At one time, Elena loved working as a nurse, but in recent years at the hospital, she describes having a nagging feeling that she wasn’t fulfilling her purpose. “Healthcare was rewarding but it wasn’t the thing to set my soul on fire,” she said.
In early 2024, she made the decision to turn her passion for art into a full-time career.
“One day, I sat down and looked at the numbers and said to myself, ‘This is going to be a gamble, but I’m going to bet on myself,’” she said. “I got up one day, wrote my two-week notice, and never looked back.”
Since pursuing art full-time, her art career has taken off. Elena now spends long days working on prints and sketches, travels to art expos around the country, and isn’t one to turn down a challenge.
Her art ranges from small landscapes to custom 6-foot wildlife drawings, primarily in charcoal powder. From day one, her natural knack for drawing was obvious, and with a lot of trial and error with charcoal, she’s perfected her craft.
Through finding her own groove as a self-taught artist, she’s become an inspiration to many to chase their dreams.
“It can be intimidating not to have a guaranteed outcome,” she says. “Most people will stop in fear of chaos, asking, ‘What if I fail?’ But I would encourage people to consider, but what if it works out? You don’t have to have everything figured out. You don’t even have to know exactly where you’ll end up. You just have to take a step and keep going.”
For more information, head to www.elenajohnsonart.com.