Me And My 5 – Unison Colour Associate Artist Elena Degenhardt

Elena; –

Thank you Stephen and Unison Colour for having invited me to write this blog! I have decided to tell you a little bit about five pieces from my latest body of work – “Moments of Being” – shown last year on Artsy with the 33 Contemporary Gallery.

These works, fuelled by my love of the Mediterranean Sea, light and literature, explore the ways the light changes our usual perception of things and how it adds poetry and deeper meaning to the everyday, often mundane life, transforming it in what Virginia Woolf called “moments of being” as opposed to “moments of nonbeing” in her essay “Sketch of the Past”. These works hold fleeting moments of acute awareness of beauty, fragility, interconnectedness and transience of everything.

I grew up and have lived in different countries and cultures and have moved so often that I do not associate myself with any particular mentality, nationality or place. This often makes me feel unsettled because a sense of belonging is a human need. The only place where I regain that sense of belonging to something bigger than myself is when I am in the sea. 

This piece is mostly created in wet-on-wet technique, rare for pastels but the one I often work in, when pastel pigment is applied on a still wet surface, with a paintbrush or directly. It’s done on the UART paper mounted on archival board by Masters Art Surfaces that are sturdy enough for wet application and strong mark making.

I have been painting large scale closeups of breaking waves which directly face the viewer since the move to the island of Malta in 2017. My attitude towards the sea had been the one between awe and fear, due to a childhood accident when I almost drowned. Painting the waves which both mesmerised and horrified me became my way of dealing and overcoming deep water anxiety.

Choosing to paint wave closeups, I can perceive them as a powerful wave, evoking the variety of emotions, or I can see them as an abstraction and it is an endless visual journey. Painting breaking waves is also an attempt to grasp that fleeting moment when the dark, almost menacing waters of the stormy sea reveal breathtakingly beautiful colours and shapes inside a wave but only for a fraction of a second, and then it all breaks into darkness again, into nothingness. A wave becoming a metaphor of a human life. This piece has transcendental qualities to me. It is an encounter with the intangible presence and existential void, an experience that evokes both awe and unease. I wonder how it makes you feel. 

I love the tension between realism and abstraction here, between fine detail and raw marks done by crashing pastels against the paper. Like the previous piece, it’s also created with a lot of water applied with a large paint brush, this time on a large sheet of Pastelmat, taped onto the wall. 

Living on the Côte d’Azur, in the south of France, I am lucky enough to spend everyday by the sea, swimming all year round, observing it and painting en plein air. These small studio pieces are three variations of the same theme. Little moments of awe. They were a happy dance of mark making from the beginning to the end. They just happened. Like breathing. I love their effortless beauty and fluidity but also their slight ambivalence. What does the sea actually reveal?