A drive to yoga class about 10 years ago provided an aha moment for Teresa Elliott. As she drove by a pasture of longhorns, she was so taken by what she saw that she returned the next day and took photographs of them. “There was a bull there,” she says. “It was hot, and he was miserable and stomping his feet. I took a snapshot and went back home and that was my first painting.”

Little did Elliott realize how popular her longhorn portraits would become, how eagerly collectors would seek them out. She painted them because she loved them and, in the process, she made a name for herself as talented artist. “I got together a few oil paintings, went to a local gallery, and they ate them up,” she says. “They wanted me to have a show right away. The show was hugely successful; it sold out.”

Teresa Elliott

Warm Winter
Oil
40″ x 40″
“This calf in north-central Texas was living through a brutal winter that bore him long bushy fur. When I captured him here in January, it was suddenly warm and still at the end of the day, with even warmer lights over the pasture of longhorns.”

Teresa Elliott

Splash
Oil
30″ x 30″
“After a flash flood in Graham, Texas, the parched gullies fill to the brim—a perfect, natural swimming hole during a warm March afternoon.”