Trip
leads painter to put her feelings into her work
August
5, 2005 from the Ventura County Star
By Nicole D'Amore
Elana
Kundell's abstract paintings are about feelings rather than things.
Painting
is her way of trying to understand the world, she said, whether
it's war, death, relationships from the past or a piece of music.
"It's very much intuitive, emotional color," she said.
"It's an organic process. I don't know what it's going to look
like when it's finished."
Kundell,
27, moved from San Francisco last year back to Newbury Park, where
she grew up. This week she moved her art to Studio Channel Islands
Art Center, where she is the newest, and youngest, artist-in-residence.
Kundell
started creating at an early age.
"A
book recently turned up that was written and illustrated by me when
I was 5," she said. "I did portraits of my friends in
junior high. I needed to express myself, whether it was art, dance
or screaming. I wanted to do everything."
She
fell in love with figure drawing when she took a class from Frank
Sardisco at Moorpark College while in high school.
"He
gave you three minutes to have the entire figure drawn," she
said. "The first day it was a shock seeing a naked person in
front of us but as soon as the shock subsided I fell in love with
the endless variation in forms the body presented."
Kundell
went on to the University of California, Santa Cruz, and earned
a bachelor's degree in art in 2000. During college she spent a year
at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Bologna, Italy, which changed
the direction of her art.
"I
went to the cradle of figurative art expecting to improve my technique
and was instead pushed to the brink of expression," she said.
It
was on a trip to Paris that she viewed a Rothko retrospective that
she said changed her life.
"All
of a sudden you come into this room and you are confronted with
the laws of the universe and yourself. They are bigger than you.
You can't escape," she said. "I had never known the psychological
power of color."
Viewing
the Rothko exhibit was part of a convergence of factors that led
to her rejection of figurative artwork and her move into abstract.
"It was a feeling that it was too easy to take a figure for
granted. There was something more," she said. "To challenge
myself to find out what was behind that, I started to work with
emotion conveyed through color."
Part
of the rejection of painting the body came from her feminist views.
"How could I portray the body without turning it into an object?"
she said.
Kundell
paints three or four days a week, she said.
"But
I am always drawing and looking," she said. "Observing
the sunset, staring at the moths and crusted walls. It's some serendipitous
combination of color and texture. It's just the idiosyncracies of
everyday life. If you just stop and look around, life is so beautiful."
She
hasn't entirely given up representational work. Recently she and
fellow artist Maribel Hernandez painted murals in her father's pediatric
office.
Kundell
is participating in the Art & All That Jazz Festival at Studio
Channel Islands Art Center on Aug 13. She also is exhibiting in
the Ventura Artwalk with Hernandez at DeSoto Salon on Aug. 20 and
at a Special Olympics benefit at the Sherwood Country Club in Thousand
Oaks on Aug. 21. She was selected for a Vermont Studio Center residency
during the month of September.
For
more information about the Art & All That Jazz festival, call
383-1368.
