Painting is a very reflective and personal process for me which partially explains my choice of the painting medium - soft pastels and charcoal - as they create no barrier between me and the artwork. I use them predominantly in a painterly manner, often in washes. I pour all my energy into my work, painting only what I feel and know. I’ve been always fascinated by time, full of fear of its passing. I may paint and draw various subjects but it’s the ephemeral, transient, fragile and vulnerable in them that draws me and this is what I try to hold in a visual image.

Elena Degenhardt (b. 1977) is a Siberia-born multiple award-winning, internationally exhibiting German artist, currently living on the Mediterranean Coast of France. Elena is best known for her immersive, colour intense waterscapes and underwater figurative works and evocative portraits. She explores personally relevant themes of lost and found identities, displacement, fears and fragility of life, memory and time, using soft pastels as a primary medium, drawing on her profound connection to the sea. She paints en plein air and in the studio, from life, imagination and her own photo references. Classically educated in art in her teens and a two MA degrees holder in Languages and Literatures, Elena got back to art in 2015, after an international career in teaching and translating. Between 2015 and 2018, she attended art classes in pastel with Jo Hall, HonSGFA, portraiture masterclass with Gareth Reid and life figure drawing classes with Jesmond Vassallo in England and Malta. Full-time artist since 2017, Elena is a Master Pastellist with the International Association of Pastel Societies an elected member of several established art societies, including The Pastel Society of America (Signature Member), Society of Graphic Fine Art, UK (Full Member) and Professional Association of Visual Artists of Germany (BBK Kunstforum Düsseldorf). Galleries and museums that have shown her work include Mall Galleries London (shown with RSMA, PS, SGFA), The Atkinson Southport (Shortlist for the Ruth Borchard Self Portrait Prize 2023), SolArt Gallery Dublin, Dortmunder U Germany, Salmagundi Club and The National Arts Club NYC, Palazzo de la Salle (Malta Society of Arts) and Wignacourt Museum Malta, Abend Gallery, 33 Contemporary Gallery, Zhou B Art Center and Wausau Museum for Contemporary Art, USA. She has exhibited alongside Arina Gordienko, Allessandro Tomassetti, Colin Davidson, Megan Read, Curtis Holder and Amanda Grieve. Her work is featured in the American Art Collector, Fine Art Connoisseur, Pastel Journal, several PoetsArtists publications, Pratique Des Arts and Artists&Illustrators. It is part of The Lunar Codex project, archiving art on the moon, https://www.lunarcodex.com and of private collections throughout Europe, USA, Canada, UK and Australia.