The Red Barn Studio Museum
Ukrainian-born Israeli artist Elena Samarsky will be the Artist-in-Residence at the Red Barn Studio Museum from September 3rd to September 28th. A reception will be held on Sunday, September 24th from 2 to 4 pm for Elena.
Elena is a self-taught artist who operates from her small studio in Hoboken, New Jersey, where she specializes in creating abstract paintings. Her artistic approach involves emotional and intellectual engagement, which helps her cope with and understand new contexts. Through her art, she expresses her feelings and processes new experiences.
From previous experiences during residencies in rural and remote areas, Elena has learned that being in a new location has helped her to disconnect and concentrate on her own artistic process without disturbances of everyday life and routine. The solitude, as well as change of environment can be very thought provoking and productive. Inspired by a new environment, and surrounded by many creations of Lester Raymer might lead to higher sensitivity and spark curiosity to use the different color palettes and experiment with texture, thereby enhancing her creativity.
Elena will spend most of her time creating a series of new paintings inspired by Kandinsky, Chagall, and Malevich, whose work represents the USSR/Russian Ukrainian Avant-Garde movement. She will reflect on how their work impacts her color palette and composition as well as reflect on her own Ukrainian heritage and self-identification in her own work.
About Elena
"I am a self-taught artist inspired by abstract expressionism. A Ukrainian-born Israeli, I have always been a creative person: I wrote poems and danced since my early childhood. However, I only started to paint much later in life, during my university studies. It was during the time when I had an opportunity to live in several different countries – Austria, Germany, UK – and painting abstracts has helped me to cope and understand new contexts, to express my feelings about it, and digest new experiences. In addition to being trained as a sociologist, during my PhD at the University of Oxford I had my first solo exhibition and started to focus more on my art and engage more actively with the art community. Since then, I have exhibited my works in the UK, Finland, and the USA, and have been a finalist and winner of various juried exhibitions. I participated in several artistic residencies in Europe and the USA and in 2021, I co-authored a book with an American poet Timothy Tarkellyentitled “All Other Form of Expression: Paintings and Poems by Elena Samarsky and Timothy Tarkelly”.
Elena-Samarsky