Meet our featured artist – Elena Senatorova. She came to RUSART in early 2020, right before the pandemic. Being very familiar with our brands, Elena became a frequent customer and supporter of our small business.
That’s how she describes herself in arts. “In my artwork, the most important to me is to capture the first feelings and emotions, the taste and flavour of a moment with the object. That is how I paint, never losing sight of that vision.”
How everything started
Elena Senatorova was born in Moscow, Russia, but very soon, her family moved to live in Beijing, China, where she grew up. Elena graduated from Beijing Language & Culture University with a Bachelor of Arts and Chinese language, and from Moscow Pedagogical State University with a Bachelor of History. She got married and moved to Canada, worked in fields not related to art. However, a very tragic event in her family changed the whole course of her life.
As a result, she quitted her job and started a path of becoming a professional visual artist. “I was evaluating my life and realized that I wasn’t happy with my carrier. I needed to find the path, which will fulfill my soul again and bring the worthiness and meaning back into my life… The Universe heard me – I started to see human faces of different ages and gender when I closed my eyes… it felt quite weird until I realized what I was supposed to do – I signed up for the introductory course in oils at West Vancouver Community Center.” That was in 2015.
Elena’s Art Journey
Since then, Elena is constantly working on her skills and abilities to capture on canvas the day-by-day experiences and transformations from nature scenes to human faces. Her main medium is oil.
She prefers to work from life, saying “photographic images do not do the justice of the colors and values, plus what is really valuable for me is to capture the first impression of the object, scene, or moment, and that unique connection I have with it. Capture all the above and show it to the viewer. “
What about art vision, Elena chose the self-directed approach with her studies. She is constantly reading numerous publications of professional artists, magazines, blogs, websites, and social media. She took personal and online workshops with the leading artists from Canada, USA, and Russia – Deborah Tilby, Alan Wylie, Maria Josenhans, Justin O’Gilvie & Steve Williams from Canvas Method, Martinho Isidoro Correia from Angels Academy of Arts Florence, Domenique Medici, Daniel J Keys, Michelle Dunaway, Kathy Anderson, Joshua LaRock, Zhaoming Wu, Anton Levin & Nikita Mogilevtsev from Russian Academy of Fine Arts and many more.
Also, she attended the summer school at Angels Academy of Arts in Florence. To learn many different techniques, she studied classical method of painting by executing master copies of William A. Bouguereau, Caravaggio, John Singer Sargent, I. Kramskoi, Claude Monet, Van Gogh, etc.
As an artist who loves working from life, she attends live model sessions, constantly paints outdoors – En Plein Air.
Where to find Elena’s works
Please visit Elena’s website – http://www.elenasenatorova.com to view her works.
Follow this featured artist on Instagram @Senatorovaart or on FB to see the day-by-day work and life of the artist.
