About Me
My mother often tells a story of how when I was three years old, I told her I would draw a picture everyday so that when I grew up, I would be an artist. While many twists and turns happened between the setting of that goal and its actualization, at the end of 2019 I moved into full-time art as a self-taught oil and watercolor painter.
I was a bright student and enjoyed learning, and upon finishing high school in three years, I was discouraged from pursuing formal artistic training due to the idea that it was impossible to make a living from being creative. Though I was young, I already knew I couldn’t spend my life working a job I wasn’t passionate about. Besides art and music, I enjoyed spiritual/philosophical thought and digging into whatever it meant to be human. Coming from a religious family and upbringing, this translated into attending the Masters University and getting my bachelor’s degree in Bible, studying theology and counseling from a Christian perspective. I managed to do this in two and a half years, graduating magna cum laude, and a week before turning twenty moved to Jackson Hole, WY to help start a church.
Five years later, I went through an abrupt and challenging departure from Christianity and the entirety of life as I had known it. I remember shortly after, in tears, vowing to myself that if I reached old age and looked back on my life, my regrets would not be the things I didn’t do. I had gotten an earth shattering second lease on life and I wasn’t about to waste it.
In the couple years prior, while working at the Jackson Hole Mountain Resort, I had been teaching myself graphic design. Almost exactly when my life shifted, I also landed my first full time graphic design job. That meant my creative free-time could be spent elsewhere and this was when I really began to focus on painting. Within a year I was selling my work. I continued to develop as a graphic designer and eventually was working at Stio, an outdoor apparel company based in Jackson Hole. Pursuing my dream of painting often meant working 14+ hour days to hold it all. In late 2019 I quit my design job and moved into full-time art.
While most of my focus at this point goes toward painting, my almost-twenty-year love affair with snowboarding shifted into backcountry guiding in 2022 and I now spend the winters in Japan as a backcountry ski guide (for Type Two Three). I have collaborated with various outdoor brands over the past few years as an artist/athlete and was featured in “Both & Neither,” a short rock climbing film with Mountain Hardware. I also continue to do freelance graphic design, particularly where digital art and design meet (click here to view my design portfolio). While 2D art is my specialty, I have helped create various large scale 3D art installations with Claudia Bueno such as FractaLife and Pulse at Meow Wolf Las Vegas, and Echoes of The Heart at the Hermitage Museum in Norfolk, VA.
At the beginning of 2025, I transitioned my eight-year study of astrology into offering natal and transit readings, specializing in one-on-one multi-session work with clients to deeply understand their astro current transits, gaining clarity and direction on what is moving through their life and how to best work and grow with it.
Within the next year, I am excited to be working on various projects and new offerings. For the last couple years I have been quietly writing and practicing a lot of music and in 2026 will be recording and releasing my first album (click here for GoFundMe if you’d like to help bring this vision to life). I look forward to branching into new offerings at the junction of worldview, spirituality, connection to nature, dreams, art and music. Follow me on Instagram to stay up to date with what I am up to: @natalieconnell_art.
About My Art
I have always found inspiration in nature, not only deep in the mountains and desert–the wilderness–but also in everyday moments, where I find astounding beauty and color everywhere if you slow down enough to observe it. The light and dark are both necessary to bring forth a vibrant, living piece of work. My connection to nature has become not only a deep source of inspiration, but of wisdom and guidance in a rapidly changing and tumultuous world. This deepening connection to nature has included my own roots, and a delving into my Mexican ancestry/mestizo culture, and much of the wisdom being lost in the pace of life today. All of this has caused a profound shift in my art in the past year, and has allowed the birth of my most recent body of work. It is my hope that through interacting with my art, viewers may be inspired to slow down, connect with nature and the inherent beauty of their own humanity, and walk into the future remembering the path of peace and balance.