Today’s featured artist is Elena Salnikova.
She paints stunning portraits in oil, usually with the subject outdoors amongst nature. Her still lifes are also impressive. You can see a few of my favorites below. They are colorful and playful, but not so much that they appear cartoonish and overly stylized. Her style also seems particularly suited to painting a child’s innocent and playful nature and youth.
Notice how she often combines a realistic and carefully rendered focal point with a more abstract and painterly background. This mimics how we see the world—when we focus on an object, we see it with clarity and everything else blurs into abstract colors and shapes. Another artist who does this well is Vladimir Volegov, who I wrote about in my Exploring the Masters series.
Happy painting!
Dan Scott
Draw Paint Academy
PS. Enrollment closes shortly for our Color Masterclass for those who want to join this cohort.
