- ELGA KUZMENKO
- ABSTRACT ARTIST
- SANREMO. ITALY.
Elga’s Art Statement:
I live in Italy on the Riviera of Flowers, on the border with the French Côte d’Azur.
Drawing and painting have always been my favorite pastimes since childhood. My first art teacher was my father, an artist, and a very creative person. From 8 to 15 years I attended Art School. After school, however, I did not have the courage to continue my studies in this direction and I took a master’s degree in History of Art. Subsequently, I obtained a post-graduate master’s degree in Attribution and evaluation of antiques and vintage jewelry, and in the following years, I worked in auction houses and with private collectors. Later I worked as a consultant in the jewelry sector for Italian companies looking for new foreign markets.
With the birth of my son, I had to change my life a lot, and later I took care of him and my family. But art in one form or another has always been part of my world. In the past two years after the famous Lockdown 2020, I’ve felt a strong call to return to my original creativity. It took me some time because before resuming painting on canvas I went through several phases, dedicating myself to other fine arts.
Painting for me is a way to combine two apparently incompatible sensations: to live an experience of absolute inner freedom and at the same time to be an integral part of a unique structure that includes everything that surrounds us. As if it exactly the creative act that makes me feel and understand my existence more.
I am an introverted person and sometimes I am delighted to observe the little things like the seagulls on the sea you see from my studio or the texture of a tree bark wet from the rain. I love nature, the sea, music, and reading. I believe that in my art I am constantly looking for my own artistic language that allows me to convey profound concepts using an ever simpler and clearer visual aesthetic. Just as a word spoken in a certain way can already explain everything, so for me a shape, a line, or even just a color, or vice versa – their absence – can contain an infinite world of sensations.
My abstract painting is often evocative to me. But it is only from the beginning, because then, leaving me behind while I paint, I look for spaces of silence, the unwritten pages to fill. My art allows me to “tell” my inner personality and to have a “dialogue” through my work with the outside world beyond words.
Marc Chagall said: “The freer the soul, the more abstract painting becomes”. This is exactly what I feel when I create.
ARTWORKS FOR SALE BY ELGA KUZMENKO