Doreen Ellis

Doreen Ellis passed away on July 3, 2025, while traveling in Ireland. An encaustic artist, Doreen was attending a workshop retreat in Mulranny on the west coast. She was found in her room, having died peacefully in the early morning hours. Her bedroom window was open, the curtains drawn back, leaving clear her view of the garden labyrinth just outside. It had been a starry night.

She was born Doreen Adele Jimenez in Kalamazoo, Michigan, the second of three children, to Dolores and Lawrence Jimenez. The family moved to Chicago, Illinois, later settling in California's San Fernando Valley. As a teenager, Doreen was influenced by her father's interest in Carl Jung as well as her mother's artistic talents. She was deeply affected by writers Milan Kundera, Rainer Maria Rilke and Pablo Neruda, as well as the French impressionists, Monet, Degas and Renoir. Doreen developed a philosophic and romantic bent, becoming an adventurer and an explorer. She was ravenously curious, radically impulsive, intuitively taking life-decisions in the pause, the still moment between one heartbeat and the next. It's this restlessness, this always-openness, that is the perfume she leaves behind.

Doreen graduated from UC Berkeley, completed her master's in psychology from John F. Kennedy University, and began her 42-year career as a psychotherapist. Her specialties included marriage and family counseling, working with children, teens, and people with drug and alcohol dependencies. Doreen's clientele ranged in age from 8 to 80; her dedication to them was both enervating and powerfully life-giving.

Having relocated to the Sedona area, Doreen settled into her new community, purchasing a house in Cottonwood and launching a new psychotherapy practice.

She was enraptured by the mysterious red-rock vistas, the sunsets, spotless skies, and the extremes of weather rolling through. She signed up for yoga classes in town, where she soon met her future husband, Seth Ellis. A romance unfolded, and they married two years later, made a home, and shared their lives.

Doreen was a student of beauty, especially the natural world. She loved to camp, to ramble the shorelines of Northern California, the painted deserts of Arizona or the Montana wilderness. She'd gladly settle into a remote riverside cabin with Seth, then pull up stakes and head for the next river, the next mountain.

Always physically bold, Doreen was nimble, confident and tough, taking on a number of athletic activities across her lifetime. In California, she discovered the world of Arabian horses, trail-riding, and equine husbandry, eventually competing in cross-country endurance races. In Sedona, Doreen took up flyfishing, rock-climbing, and the maddening, hopeless satisfactions of golf, all pastimes she and Seth enjoyed together.

Doreen was an animal lover. There was always a kitten, a cat, a bird, a colt, a mutt with its head hammocked in her hands or snoring at her feet. In recent years, she fell hard for golden retrievers. She and Seth adopted four along the way: Sydney, Cooper, Ruby, and Finley. Goldens became the third heartbeat of the Ellis household.

One day, Doreen unpacked her paints, her brushes and her turpentine; from studio work, she advanced to plein-air painting. She knocked around the landscapes of Sedona, Jerome, and Cottonwood, capturing light, color and atmosphere with a swift hand. She experimented in watercolors, acrylics, and oils, with different teachers, diversifying her skills, and developing her voice.

When she discovered encaustics, Doreen took to it like a duck to water. Using fire, beeswax and damar resin, she layered her colors, fusing the strata with heat, building up depths of texture that drank up light and shone it back transformed. As she wrote in her most recent artist statement, "The process feels like a metaphor for the layers of the human psyche. It allows me to shape feeling into form, to speak in a way words never could."

Doreen was prolific, her works displayed in numerous publications, exhibitions and juried shows. Doreen's subject matter included dark, moody landscapes, the changing weather at a coastal shore, birds, and abstracts. Doreen's heart, however, her laughter, are most brightly felt in her flowers. Riotous and insolent, Doreen's flowers are also her most conversational paintings, the most immediately recognizable as Doreen Ellis works.

Doreen's Celebration of Life drew friends, relations, colleagues, and fellow artists. In his welcome invocation, Seth said of Doreen's psychotherapy practice that she was "a spy, operating in people's most intimate emotional spaces. The work was private." Yet here at the celebration, her therapy clients were recounting her successes and their own, openly sharing the unforgettable impact Doreen had on their personal and professional lives. For some, her work was lifesaving.

In art, Doreen discovered a public-facing vocation. Her successes tumbled forward with exhilarating velocity, to her astonishment and delight. A clearing opened, became a road and she ran it, following her dreams all the way to Ireland for more learning, more experience, more art. Doreen's road stopped beneath an open window, starlight on her face, her heart forever paused beside a labyrinth; a small oak tree is planted by the labyrinth, in her honor.

Doreen Ellis is survived by her lifetime of beloveds. Among them, her husband, Seth Ellis of Sedona, AZ, her sisters, Deborah Theisen of Benicia, CA and Sheila Moravic of Kearney, MO, her younger brother, Lawrence Jimenez of Canoga Park, CA, her friends of 35 years, Liz Campana and Scott Barrett of Fairfax, CA, their daughter, Sofia Campana Barrett of Portland, OR, her friend of 45 years, Amanda Moody, of Berkeley, CA, and her three golden darlings, Cooper, Ruby, and Finley.

In early 2025, Doreen declared herself, writ big and bold, across her gallery wall:

Doreen Ellis Art - Painting With Fire
It's how she lived. Now epitaph.