ELANA WINSBERG – ARTIST STATEMENT

I thought I was supposed to be an artist from the start. My life took me on a path to a career in visual journalism – photography, web and graphic design instead. I worked at various major newspapers.

When my last newspaper shut down I jumped at the chance into intensive study of painting and drawing in the genre of realism at Gage Academy of Art. For the last two years I have studied full time under Mark Kang O’Higgins’ Drawing and Painting Atelier.

This show, my Swan Song to Gage before embarking on my next step as an artist, features a collection of paintings done over that course of that study. It includes charcoal drawings, life studies, original oil portraits, still life paintings and also master copies of some of the living artists I most admire: Lucien Freud, Susan Hauptman, Xenia Hausner, Michael Boremans and John Currin.

Creating master copies or copies of work by masters much in the way a pianist plays Mozart or Bach, was a traditional learning tool used by artists, who learned in apprenticeships under a master artist. This was so until the practice went out of favor, but has been reestablished in the reemergence of the atelier system and realism in American art.

Please sign the guest book if you would like to be notified of future shows. I have on scheduled for October Edmonds Art Walk. If you are interested in the purchase of a painting, or in a commissioned work, I can be contacted at 206-335-4175.