[1] In 1979, Goble moved to Ottawa, Ontario, where she continues to live, and worked as a secretary on Parliament Hill during her first five years there.
[2] She resigned from her full-time job in Ottawa, Ontario to pursue her artistic career in the early 1980s upon meeting Paul Duval, her mentor.
After two years of working towards a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree at York University, she moved back to Avon, Ontario due to the high pressure of becoming an artist in the city.
Goble finds inspiration from photographs of strangers, an example of this is referencing pictures of veterans she took at a Remembrance Day ceremony in Ottawa, Ontario.
Through her drawings she hopes to emphasize the subjects personalities by listening to their stories and combining significant details of their lives within each piece.
In her Cost of War: The Canadian Homefront exhibition, the process of each piece took 6-9 months to complete, this included multiple meetings with her subjects to understand their background and engage in photography sessions.
This process begins with a photograph being printed then transferred onto large pieces of mat board where she then copies the images onto her own support.
This work depicts the true story of Lucy Gagnon who is pictured alongside her husband and teenage daughter.
While explaining what this piece is about Elaine says, “I think what’s really important is that she was put in a position where there was no right answer, where there are messy unfortunate decisions that will make people unhappy when one has to go into a dangerous area and leave kith and kin behind.”[6] For over a decade, she worked on her contemporary war-themed series that is inspired by the consequences of war.
Other artists following this movement of contemporary military art include Gertrude Kearns, Allan Harding Makay, Scott Waters, and Alex Colville.
Portraits, Solo Exhibition of Egg Tempera Paintings, Nancy Poole’s Studio, Toronto, Ontario, 1994.
In the late 1990s, Goble began to focus on solo exhibitions which include: The Collection- Ten Years Later, Karsh- Masson Gallery, Ottawa, ON, 1996.
In the mid-late 2000s, she began producing some work that she is most well-known for; Solo Exhibition, Dale Smith Gallery, Ottawa, Ontario, 2005.
In 2012, she created one major piece, Double Take: Portraits of Intriguing Canadians, and continued it as a traveling exhibition featured at a variety of locations between the years of 2012-2014.
The Agnes Etherington Art Centre, Queen's University at Kingston, Ontario, 2013-14, and the Canadian Military Engineers Museum, Oromocto, New Brunswick, 2014.