Conversations with Ella Fortini

Today we’d like to introduce you to Ella Fortini.

Hi Ella, thanks for sharing your story with us. To start, maybe you can tell our readers some of your backstory.
My name is Ella Fortini and I am an artist, surfer, writer and probably a billion other things, living in Laguna Beach. I grew up on the Central Coast of California and was lucky enough to have two extremely creative parents who really nurtured my artistic mind. In my opinion the Central Coast is arguably one of the most beautiful places in the world and the surrounding open, natural spaces really set up this sort of mental freedom inside me from a super young age. I remember always doing something with art. Painting for endless hours, building fairy houses, running around on the beach and drawing with my toes in the sand, sewing with my late grandmother, giving my two younger sisters art lessons in the old airstream we had sitting in our backyard, were all such key parts of my childhood. In our old house we had this really horrendous wallpaper which my mum combated by putting up every single piece of art I made. It literally stretched from our kitchen all through the living and dining room. I always joke that I had my first solo show at 6 years old because of this.
In all honesty I was a pretty weird kid, I mean who wasn’t, but like socially things just did not connect for me. I preferred to spend my time in my own little world drawing, reading, talking to myself, all the little kid things you’d imagine. In school I never really felt like I fully belonged. I always wished for a best friend, and I did have friends, but it really just always felt like I wasn’t a first choice. I also grew up dancing, which consumed about 12 years of my childhood. This was a whole host of minor trauma that really impacted how I saw and valued myself inside and out. I am not very naturally athletically gifted, so I had to work my ass off to be even a fraction as good as the other girls. This was also my first experience with any thoughts concerning my body. I remember majorly body checking from age 5. Staring at yourself everyday in tights and leotards which a bunch of other girls mid puberty definitely takes a toll on how you see yourself.
I would write stories and illustrate them, making main characters that portrayed the ideal version of myself. She was good at ballet, really smart, had so many best friends, was super skinny and probably also good at running (because in elementary school you’re “cool” if you can run fast). I would fill up notebooks upon notebooks with these drawings. I really don’t think my brain works in a super conventional way, which I have now come to find out is pretty common in most artists. My “focus issues” were always the topic at the parent teacher conferences, stating that I was drawing too much during class and wasn’t listening. But the thing is, I was listening and retaining more information than if I was just staring straight ahead. This theme of having my parents called to the school continued into my teens. Middle school was a whole other beast. I honestly don’t remember it in much detail. It really was a game of conformity where I really dropped all the things that I loved because I thought they would make me less cool. I kind of just accepted that growing up was sacrificing the things you liked so you could fit in. My creative outlet really shifted from free form drawing to a rigid schedule of dancing 20+ hours a week and texting boys on water breaks. However art was always in the back of my mind and would show up in little corners. I was always doodling in my notebooks and used art as a way to get all my angsty teenage feelings out. I never took art classes in school and was overall just really private about what I was creating. There are always those kids that are labeled as the “art kids” and I didn’t feel like I even compared to what they were doing and that was okay because it was always my own little personal escape from the world around me. High school was the same story of just getting by I suppose. I was always caught in this weird duality of the whole ballet world and then the surf/beach culture of my hometown. I felt far too scrappy to be a ballerina but also too feminine to be a surfer alongside all the boys. This led to quitting dance around age 16 and flying off the rails. I always trip out on some of the things I was exposed to at that time.
About a year later COVID-19 hit and my family and I moved back into the two bedroom house on the beach where I was born. It was a really wholesome homecoming of sorts at first. I was ditching all my zoom classes to surf and paint all day. By putting my art out there I actually started getting positive feedback and got commissioned to paint a surfboard for a local cafe. Here things shifted in my brain and I realized art is something I want to do for the rest of my life. I started applying to colleges and after much discourse I decided to major in visual arts. I also had gotten into a new relationship at the beginning of the pandemic which quickly turned very abusive. He was extremely manipulative and quickly isolated me from my friends and family. I was 17 years old the first time I was sexually assaulted and this is something that continued throughout the next few years. As a means of control, I spiraled deep into an eating disorder and was diagnosed with Anorexia Nervosa a few months later. Food and the way my body looked felt like the only things I had a grasp on. As my eating disorder consumed my life, it pushed out any creative energy I had. I just could no longer find the mental capacity to make any kind of art. My partner was encouraging and even would state he liked me better that way. He pushed me to follow him to a small Christian college in San Diego which really did not align with anything I wanted to do, but in a deranged state of mind I listened. We ended up breaking up a few months before I started school due to the fact I could no longer have sex because all my organs were shutting down. I moved into my dorm that fall weighing only a few pounds more than our family dog. Hoping for a fresh start on my new life, I was feeling confident I would recover and beat my ED. However due to a very small student body, things with my ex picked up right where they left off. This was probably the worst time of my life. I was getting black out drunk every weekend and felt like I could not tell anyone anything without them thinking I was crazy because of how sick I looked. The school’s solution was to basically just pray about me gaining weight and getting healthy again. The push for Christianity was so suffocating and has left such a bad taste in my mouth to this day. I also knew I couldn’t report the sexual assault I was enduring because of the living agreement we were required to sign upon application. It basically stated we would not drink or have sex while being a student there. I ended up getting reported to the school anonymously, and got kicked out for being a medical liability. This truly spiraled me out so hard and I just wanted my life to end. I moved back home and shared a bunk bed with my youngest sister at the ripe age of 18. There were so many feelings of failure that constantly plagued my thoughts. I immediately dove back head first into recovery and as things started to look up, I started to be able to create again. Art became my #1 source of communication, expression and helped me process so much of what was happening.
I have so much gratitude for my parents because I was an absolute nightmare at this time. They advocated for me always and helped curate the best team of professionals to get me the help I needed. I truly owe my life to them. As I started to get healthy, I was able to start exercising again, which allowed me to get back in the ocean. I didn’t realize how much of a meditative and creative space surfing provided for me until that time and it’s something I also will never take for granted. I won’t say that recovery from anything is an easy road. I had so many ups and downs, including a major relapse. Each moment, good and bad, only further solidified why I wanted to recover.
In spring of 2023 my mum and I stayed down in Laguna for my birthday. She grew up visiting here every summer in the 80s and took me to visit when I was younger as well, so lil ol Laguna holds a very special place in both our hearts. When we were leaving town, we drove by Laguna College of Art & Design and she was all like “hey remember when you applied to school there but then decided to not go?” I had opted out of wanting to go to an art school back in 2020 because of fear of burn out. Post college kick out, I had a very “fuck college” mentality and wanted to make way on my own. I had just launched my own clothing brand of sorts and was feeling pretty unstoppable in my cocky 19 year old brain. I built a website, set up wholesale accounts and heat pressed my art onto shirts, all on my own. My first collection sold out in one day and I was shipping my shirts all around the world. I released a few more collections over the next few months and hit a point where I knew I needed more to grow my practice. I decided to reapply to LCAD on a whim just a few months before the spring semester started. I got into LCAD in December of 2023 and moved into my first one bedroom apartment on January 1st of 2024. I was so nervous living alone for the first time, let alone living in a new town. For a moment everything was going spectacular. I didn’t really have a direction with my art but I was in an environment surrounded by people who were just like me for maybe the first time in my life. I was making real friends who I could be my truest self around. I continued to make more clothes, sell at new art markets and I even fell in love with a super special boy. The combination of belonging and having a supportive healthy relationship for the first time ever was incredible and I was on cloud nine. I had finally found my artistic voice and was making pieces that I started to even feel proud of.
Since moving to Laguna I have had my fair share of pretty gnarly ups and downs. Heartbreak, both my parents getting cancer in the same year, suicidal thoughts and attempts, a bike accident that resulted in ubering myself to the ER and rocking a black eye for a few weeks, to name a few. Throughout all of this my art has been there for me. Like in my beginnings of recovery, my main form of communicating how I felt was through my drawings. It became a way of processing what I had been through and the more I created the more I wanted to share. I started writing and sharing everything that had happened to me in the last few years. Getting these things off my chest was one of the final stepping stones in my healing journey. I am now wrapping up my junior year at LCAD as an illustration major. My inner thoughts are no longer harmful, I am healthy, physically and mentally, and have such a lovely community and support system. It truly doesn’t feel real. If you were to tell my 19 year old self that at 22 I would find inner peace again, she would probably flip you off and not believe you. As summer approaches and life continues to shift with the seasons, I can confidently say I am the happiest I have been since I was a child running barefoot on the beach.

We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
I definitely would not use the term “a smooth road” to describe my life. The last 5 years have been pretty close to hell for me, but I also would not go back and change anything if I could. I’m a really firm believer that everything happens for a reason and that there is a learning lesson in every single experience, whether you figure that out right away, or figure that out figure that out a few years later. I’ve have used so much of what I’ve been through to fuel not only my drive for success but also just as subjects for my art. If I was not meant to create and share all of these experiences, then I would not have endured them. For example my whole teenage relationship, I find myself wondering why I was a victim in that situation and why I am still the one dealing with the mental repercussions and trauma of it, while he is getting off pretty much scot-free.the wondering “why me” and “why did this happen to me” could easily have taken over my life. But in the end it happened and I can’t change that, so now I’m taking those pieces and deciding what can I make with that. The same goes for my eating disorder. I don’t think if I wasn’t meant to survive I would have lived. I was very close to dying multiple times and medically should have probably passed away. That is a crazy thought to think about, especially when you’re that deep in it’s like you don’t care. I was probably more scared of Thai food than I was of death at that time which is also insane to say. Being able to reach a point in recovery where I can speak about it and I can make art from it is so huge. It is so important to me to share my personal experience with others in the same boat because when you’re struggling with an eating disorder you’re so scared more than anything else. There’s this inner voice in your head that’s not you. It’s just this inner evil entity that is just whispering the meanest things to you all the time. So now being in a place where that no longer exists for me, I can make art from that and open up the conversation about it. Hopefully to allow those who haven’t been there, to also gain an understanding of it all. Ultimately my goal in life is to just be there to help people who have gone through things similar to me because I did not have those people in those moments who had the same firsthand experiences. Whenever I meant another person who has also dealt with an ED, there is automatically a connection and just that underlying knowing that we’ve both been to hell and back inside our own minds, and that is a pretty incredible thing.
Heartbreak is also something that I touch on a lot in my art. I always thought people were kidding when they say heartbreak literally feels like a knife to the chest, but genuinely I have never felt anything that painful in my life. Arguably it hurts more than like when I crashed on my bike and completely scraped up my entire body. That being said, it really just added so much fuel to the fire of my creative process. I’ve written so much about every relationship I’ve been in actually to be quite frank. It’s also one of those things that’s like, “how can I heal from this?” My form of healing is creating and always will be. I read somewhere that people that have more artistically driven minds ultimately feel the worst when they’re not creating because there is so much of that energy swirling around inside them. It is almost like it’s like a tumultuous stormy sea and the only way to get that out is to physically put that energy into making something. Whether that is writing, drawing, painting, making music, editing videos or literally whatever fills your cup. Just getting it all out there is so healing and so helpful, I actually will never shut up about it. The last thing that was a major bump in the road for me, was both of my parents being diagnosed with cancer on each side of the year. My mum went through a cancer journey in early 2024 and my dad went through his at the end of 2024. It’s very much a double whammy hit that almost felt laughable. Seeing my parents in such a vulnerable state when they were such strong figures, especially taking care of me just a year before, was really disorienting and there’s no words to really describe it actually. I’m so beyond lucky to see them both come out on the other end of it all. During that time there’s a lot of vices I could have turned to but I chose to be the strong example that they were for me in my lowest point. I chose to really just lean more into my art. I feel like I keep saying that, but throughout every single thing it has become the one consistent. Making art and being in creative spaces has helped me form such a supportive community and a support system within myself. I am my biggest advocate, as we all should be, and having something that is so passionately driven for me is more than I could ever ask for. I have probably told this to every single one of my friends, but I have two analogies that I love and always refer back to. The first one is, we’re all like little matchbox cars, where you have to wind it backwards to shoot it forward. My most favorite one ever is, you have to hit the bottom of the pool to push back up to the surface. So I’ll just leave it at that for now.

Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know about your work?
I once described my art as “whimsical melancholy” as a joke, and that has since stuck. Every time someone asks what the vibe of my art is I’m like “oh yeah it’s all whimsical melancholy.” The primary kind of art I do is a lot of line art. I’m really into heinous amounts of small detail. I feel like when I’m drawing these little tiny patterns, it becomes very meditative to me, which is super important in my process. I use a lot of pen and ink, Micron pens are my best friend. I also do some digital and I oil paint. I really love to paint and I’m currently painting a self portrait every semester of the school year, so I’ll have a whole collection of my face by the time I graduate. I just love anytime I can draw on anything. I recently had the opportunity to draw on the LCAD gallery window alongside one of my department head, John F. Malta, a few months ago and that was a truly surreal experience. It was a very imposter syndrome moment and I fulfilled my childhood dreams of actually drawing on the walls. I was also privileged enough to have a piece in the No Margins show that was there at the time. Having my work shown alongside other professionally working artists whose work I have followed for so many years left me speechless.
I tend to draw the same little characters in my art. I always draw the same girl, which I think started out as a iteration of myself and now she’s just kind of taken on her own personality. In my art, like I’ve said before, it is all telling a story that touches on themes of heartbreak, recovery and just feeling adrift in the mind space. I have a cast of characters I draw that represent the little “roommates” that live in my head. Not to sound insane, but they are like the inner voices of the good and the bad. I think I have a pretty distinct style that sets me apart from other people. I used to really struggle with questioning why my art doesn’t look like anyone else’s, but then I realized that’s exactly what you need to set you apart in the whole world of creatives. I’m most proud of just continuing to be myself in my art. I’ve had people love and hate what I’m making, had people call me “deeply disturbed” or tell me my art is “cute.” I am all about a funny duality. If I can make people question what they are looking at, I have done my job correctly. Art is so subjective, which is a very cliche thing to say, but there’s so many people on this planet and my goal is just to have my art speak to and resonate with simply a handful of people. If I can do that I will die happy.

What sort of changes are you expecting over the next 5-10 years?
I feel like the illustration industry is actually really booming right now. People are getting more controversial, weird and less sensitive to societal standards. The weirder the better, the weirder the more personal it becomes to people. With everything going on in the world, making art to represent and protest certain things is now more important than ever. There’s also always talk about Ai and the fear of it taking over everything. But I really think people just want to see cool, authentic art and that’s something Ai will never achieve, in my opinion. LA feels as if it really is the place to be for illustration and is where I hope to end up in the next few years!

Contact Info:

• Website: https://intheeyesofelfco.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/intheeyesofelf/