ABOUT ELENA BLANCO
Elena Blanco is a UK-based artist working with watercolour and ink to make paintings and drawings. Her work is often illustrative and takes inspiration from literature, cinema and dreams.
Elena's early work is sold on wall art prints, home décor and textiles on many online platforms and at stores such as Ikea, Habitat and John Lewis. Her more recent original pieces and limited edition prints, created since 2020, are sold at this shop and shipped directly from her studio in South London.
Working with watercolour and ink, she interacts with the unpredictability and fluidity of these media to conjure the illusion of light and space, creating dreamy, evocative scenery sometimes populated by silhouettes and intriguing designs that transport us to timeless landscapes reminiscent of voyage and unexplored territories.
ARTIST STATEMENT
I’m fascinated by the fact that simple marks of ink laid on a piece of paper can create such intriguing worlds.
I like to think of my work as a poetic experience, both in the making and in the viewing. My paintings do not offer messages or answers. They are the pure experience of the joy and playfulness of art making.
My process is a journey that begins with certain purposes that often get lost along the way. One thing leads to another. The questions I ask in a piece remain relevant in the next although transformed. It is a process of becoming without conclusion. I normally work in series I revisit through the years. New doors open all the time. Possibilities are never exhausted.
The accidental is part of the process from the beginning. Every contact has an impact on our minds and appears in one way or another in our work. New doors open all the time. Possibilities are never exhausted.
Art is a creative response to the creativity of the world. The artist's interaction with the world is indeed aesthetic, without functionality or judgement. It comes from a vision full of wonder and curiosity. It has no specific agenda.
Like play, the work of art, both in the process of creation and in the process of contemplation, exercises a healing function bringing us closer to the pure state of being from which everything can emerge.