Words from the Shore- Our name is our identity or is it?

Recently I changed my Instagram name from @ontheforeshoreartist to @charlotteellisart. Last night, I put up my first post since the name change and it got me thinking why has it taken me so long to do this?  Maybe I’m only now stepping into my space as a Devon artist or maybe I’m just not ready to let go of my’ ontheforeshore’ presence yet.

Watching the birds on the Exe Estuary

My on the foreshore account started two and half years ago as a place I could add photos of my paintings, art process and share aspects of my life in nature. The name was perfect as I spend so much of my time on the foreshore of the Exe estuary, in Lympstone. As I walk Joey dog , swim in the waters and sit, sketch and paint I absorb its energy, I feel its history and become at one with the bird life. I’ve found that if I sit still the birds come to me. Any movement and they are off but when in stillness I am privileged to get up close with the egrets, the turnstones, the godwits and the gulls. It is these times, when I become part of the foreshore, that I am at my most peaceful and most creative and so naturally these feelings flow into my artwork. My paintings hold a space of calm and birds feature a lot sometimes as the main focus but sometimes just as a simple mark somewhere in the sky.

Walking in Lympstone on the Exe Estuary foreshore

So why did I change my name? I was and am an artist inspired by the foreshore and that hasn’t changed but to make myself more visible and my work easier to find I decided, last month, to make my Instagram and my website match. Is this important or will it change back again? Only time will tell.  Visibility is a strange thing in that for me I want people to be able to find my work but at the same time I am happiest when alone with the birds and feel no desire at all to be in the public eye. I guess for these first few years of Instagram presence I was happy to hide away behind another name but maybe now it is time to be found and time for my paintings to get out to the  wider world just as birds fly upwards to find their place in the sky. Maybe, if I get it right, I won’t lose ‘ontheforeshoreartist’ but instead will take the beauty, calm and peace of it to become the very essence of Charlotte Ellis Art. If you are reading this, I wonder what your thoughts are. How much is our name our identity?

Charlotte Ellis Art