Music for the eyes
Art that‘s been lived in.

About the artist
Chelsea Eby is a painter and illustrator working in oil, acrylic, and occasionally gouache, based in Portage, Michigan. Her work moves fluidly between realist-impressionist portraiture and a looser, modern folk style built on lyrical brushwork and saturated strokes of color. Across mediums, her paintings share a common thread: an interest in story, memory, and the quiet emotional weight of everyday moments.
Eby's creative practice began in motherhood. The daily rhythms of raising children; the noticing, the waiting, the small rituals of family life — shaped an artistic voice that is imaginative, narrative, and unafraid of color. That same sensibility now runs through her commissioned portraiture, where she is known for capturing not just a likeness, but a feeling: the specific tilt of a beloved pet's head, the favorite stuffy clutched beneath a sleeping toddler... the moments we never want to forget.
Her faith is foundational to how she approaches her work and her business. Eby sees art-making as a form of attention and gratitude, and that conviction shapes both the spirit of her paintings and the way she builds community around them — treating collectors and clients less like customers and more like people worth knowing.
A lifelong reader, Eby brings a literary sensibility to her work, often drawing on classic and public-domain literature for inspiration and finding narrative structure even in her most whimsical illustration work. She writes about this ongoing journey — the shift toward a full-time creative life, and the reflections that come with it — in her newsletter, *Sketching a Life* on substack.
Eby operates Chelsea Eby Fine Art LLC, offering original oil paintings, illustrative prints, and hand-crafted paper goods through her website, Etsy, and wholesale channels, alongside two tiers of commissioned portrait work: intimate, gallery-scale oil paintings for life's most significant subjects, and smaller, more accessible acrylic marker portraits for everyday keepsakes. She lives and works in southwest Michigan with her husband and children.

