Lou Ella Squyres was a prolific artist, creating thousands of paintings over her lifetime. She initially worked in watercolors and later in oils and acrylics. She learned to paint from her older sister Kate while growing up, and later studied portrait painting at TCU in Fort Worth. Not just limited to artwork on canvas, her paintings of wildlife, western scenes, and the timber industry on everything from myrtlewood to old crosscut saw blades graced restaurants, homes, offices and gift shops in Southern Oregon for many years. She taught art to hundreds of students over the course of her life; a 1960 Southern California newspaper article reported she had 24 art students at that time, taught in classes no larger than five. Her artwork has been featured in a number of newspapers and publications, including a July 18, 1993 feature article in the Medford Mail Tribune.