Elena
Elena often returns to roads, stone walls and old structures. She is interested in the marks left by use and weather: a boundary repaired over time, a route worn into the land, a building still standing after its first purpose has gone.
Copperbrush Art
About
Copperbrush Art brings together the work of two painters looking closely at the Irish landscape and the signs of life within it.
Roads, walls, gardens, fields and old buildings appear again and again. They matter because people have used them, changed them, cared for them and sometimes left them behind. A place may be known firsthand, through family stories or photographs, or simply because something in it feels familiar.
The paintings begin with observation, but they are not records of a place. What matters is what remains after looking: the shape of a road, the weight of a wall, a change in light, a building altered by weather and time.
Elena and Karina approach painting differently, but both begin with close attention.
Elena tends to look outward, at roads, walls, buildings and the marks left across a landscape. Karina often looks closer, concentrating on the fine detail of a subject that might otherwise be overlooked.
The artists
Two ways of seeing
Explore Elena’s way of seeing
Karina
Karina works much closer to the subject. She is drawn to details that are easy to pass by: the edge of a leaf, the surface of a flower, the structure of a small object and the particular way light sits on something familiar.
Shared practice
Process and place
The work begins with looking.
That may mean returning to a place, working from photographs or sketches, remembering a detail, or combining several of those things.
In the studio, the source changes. Colour, surface, edge and proportion start to matter as much as the original view.
The painting does not need to reproduce the place exactly. It needs to keep hold of the reason it mattered enough to paint.