| Contemporary realist artist painting water in all forms and human condition
"Painting is a very reflective and personal process for me which partially explains my love for soft pastels as they create no barrier between me and the painting surface. I am inspired by water in all forms, people I encounter, natural world around me, smell, light, texture and form of things. Time and memory fascinate me. I work en plein air or from life but also from memory, using my own sketches, colour studies and only my own reference photographs."
Elena Degenhardt is an award winning portrait and marine artist, specialising in contemporary realism with an impressionistic touch and working mainly in soft pastels but also in other dry media and acrylics. She works a lot en plein air as well as in her home studio in Düsseldorf, Germany. Elena is a Signature Member of the Pastel Society of America http://www.pastelsocietyofamerica.org and a Member of a few other international art societies and groups, such as PoetsandArtists(USA) https://www.poetsandartists.com and The Pastel Guild of Europe https://www.pastelguild.org. Since May 2020, Elena has been an Associate Artist of the Unison Colour Soft Pastels - follow this link for more info: https://www.unisoncolour.com/associate-artists/
Elena's multicultural and multilingual experience has influenced her artistic choice of themes such as (lost and found) identities, displacement, memory and time.
Born in Siberia in 1977 and grown up there, Elena spent her early years in Germany and Latvia and immigrated to Germany in 2003. Graduated from Irkutsk Regional Youth Art School in Russia with a certificate of excellence and recommendation for further art studies, she went on to do two Master degrees in languages and literatures, and then to work as a teacher and translator in various European countries for 15 years. It was while living in England in 2014 that Elena joined a local art society and started exhibiting with them. Having won the society's Annual Exhibition Award, Elena took time out from teaching and spent a year attending art classes in soft pastels, acrylics and drawing at Norden Farm Centre for the Arts in Maidenhead, UK. She had her pastel classes with the British artist Jo Hall, SGFA. In 2015, Elena and her family moved to Vienna, Austria, where she continued finding her way back to art. Since 2017, Elena has been a full-time artist. After moving to Malta in 2017, she attended the portrait masterclass with British artist Gareth Reid and life drawing classes with Maltese artist and printmaker Jesmond Vassallo. In Summer 2019, Elena and her family moved back to Germany where she is currently living and working.
Elena has shown her work internationally, among others with PoetsArtists and the 33 Contemporary Gallery (USA) in the curated exhibition 'Shelter' on Artsy (2020); at Abend Gallery (USA) in the Small Works online-only juried show 2020; the Pastel d'Opale International Biennial 2020 (France); with The Pastel Society of West Coast in Pastels USA 2020 International Exhibition; National Society of France at Salon des Beaux Arts 2019, Carousel du Louvre, Paris (2019), the Royal Society of Marine Artists (RSMA) at Mall Galleries, London, UK (2018, 2019), the Society of Graphic Fine Arts (SGFA) in The Centenary Exhibition DRAW19 at Menier Gallery, London, UK (2019) and DRAW20 at Mall Galleries, London, UK (2020*); with the Association of Professional Artists of Austria in Vienna (2017, 2018, 2019); with the Malta Society of Arts in 'Perception' (2018) and 'Perception. Postscripts' (2019) as part of the multi-sensorial European art project AMuSE; with the International Association of Pastel Societies in the 34th juried Exhibition PastelWorld, Albuquerque, NM, USA (20218) and the 35th juried Webshow (2019); at the Southwest Academy of Fine and Applied Art (SWAc) Open Exhibition 2019, Exeter Castle, UK. Please visit 'Events' for current and upcoming exhibitions: https://www.elenadegenhardt.com/events *the exhibition at the Mall Galleries was cancelled due to the pandemic
Besides creating artwork for exhibitions, Elena works on portrait and seascape commissions.
Her artwork is in private collections throughout Europe, in the USA, Canada and Australia. |
