Ellen Lynch was born and raised in upstate New York, and began her professional career as a graphic designer in New York City. In 1996, she moved to Idaho and established Warm River Studio, continuing to serve as Art Director and designer for clients throughout the United States and Europe. This move was made possible by the proliferation of technology in the highly competitive international advertising business. With the use of the Internet, FedEx, and the telephone, she was able to work from her chosen home base, the mountains, while serving clients located in major metropolitan areas.

This dichotomy informs every cranny of Ellen’s life. She is a master of balance within great contrast.

Growing up in a Catholic family, her artist’s eye devoured the rituals and representations of the church while her native spirit kept something quietly separate. As an adult, she chooses the path of nature over man-made religion, her reverence for the work of the great creator infusing her daily life. Through her immersion in and continual observation of the Idaho landscape, she was compelled to use the technology and talents so finely tuned for advertising to pay homage to the creatures and objects she loves. In the Catholic religion, a reliquary provides the faithful with physical evidence of spiritual reality. For Ellen, the remnants of nature—dead birds, fallen flowers, smooth stones—provide the same assurance.

As an artist, working and reworking images to produce messages for advertising clients, she has honed the visual idiom of communication to its most sophisticated form. By allowing her reverence for nature to be expressed with the same exquisite attention to detail, she honors the relics of her world