Still Life with Asters Painting

Elena Barkhatkova is a contemporary Belarusian artist who works in easel painting in the still life and landscape genres. She studied with the unsurpassed master of spatial drawing and the great teacher Oleg Lutzevich, who has taught many outstanding Belarusian artists. Elena Barkhatkova paints only from nature. Her canvases gradually come to life in session after session as she devotes months of intensive work to each of her paintings. Her work always demonstrates the complex interaction of color and space, form and movement. Her open still-life composition is enhanced by diagonal lines, as Elena uses all painting techniques at her disposal, including almost imperceptible spherical distortions, thus refuting the static features that have come to characterize the genre. Her tightly composed asymmetric bouquets with their alternating small and large elements create a unique sense of dynamic movement, airiness, and depth. In her landscapes, in which she prefers to dwell on spring and autumn scenes, the artist invariably establishes her strongest compositional emphasis in the foreground, which allows her to work out the other areas of the composition down to the smallest detail without losing the feeling of integrity or the sense of the remoteness of the space. As a follower of traditions in realism, Elena Barkhatkova has been able to perfect her truly modern, world-famous painting style, which is characterized by a powerful and subjective use of color and a pronounced vitality.