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.



headshot of artist