Sayapina Elena

Biography

There are few modern artists, whose works are highly evaluated among both professionals and viewers. Elena Sayapina is one of such artists. Her paintings are always wanted in the exhibition halls and art galleries. Time and again she gets offers to hold solo exhibitions, which makes the exposition travel from place to place quite often. Besides, her colleagues-painters very much appreciate her professional skills and incorporate her as a regional Russian Artists Union Direction member and an Exhibition Jury member.
Elena Sayapina is a bright gifted artist and her diverse talents combination that she translates into action at full breath is the source of her popularity and professional substantiality. Everything she does is a success. Gold Medal for Academic Excellence at school, Diploma with honors (Arts Faculty, Kuban State University), postgraduate course degree, the Candidate's dissertation defense, Russian Artists Union membership, the associate professor degree, the Arts Faculty Deputy Dean position, the Russian Artists Union membership, the position of the head of the graphics department are just numerous dimensions of her professional merits. All these are the result of daily and fruitful work and her ability to see the key point in the problems she faces and find efficient ways for their solution.
Elena Sayapina has been on top of the “100 best scientists of KubSU” competition leader list for many years already. She got grants triply from Vladimir Potanin’s Fund, which supports young Russian teachers. This success shows time and again that Art is an inalienable part, special form of cognition and artistic transformation of everything that surrounds us. Her art is always sincere; it evokes a warm response among numerous admirers of her talent. It strengthens value system associated with traditions and prominent achievements of Kuban Fine Arts. And it’s not a surprise that in 2015 Elena Sayapina got into the final list of the most influential Kuban women.
A clever, versatile and well-educated artist is the one who is on the way to enlightened virtuosity. E. Sayapina is such an artist who can, as Vrubel said, “have a talk with nature”. Her open-air sketches and paintings capture the understanding of the complicated decorative nature of painting, they render the understanding of its materials’ figurative language originality and determination to the true nature form and color harmony reproduction. All these Russian painting school peculiarities are associated with such masters as Konstantin Korovin, Vasiliy Polenov and her degree work supervisor – Gregory Kravchenko, a Krasnodar artist, who was nominated an outstanding realistic painting master of the second half of XX century by the USA art historians.
Nature being seen through this insight prism isn’t now perceived as just common things we got used to -- green grass, white clouds, blue sky, -- but turns into a harmonious combination of flat spots of color. Such understanding and vision are conventional to a greater degree. We can overcome this problem by means of precise picture of each spot and its silhouette. If you have mastered the profession, it is not principal what the nature is, or what to paint – a still life, a portrait or a landscape. All these professional peculiarities perfectly fit into Elena Sayapina’s art and work. The painting patterns precision of her open air sketches, her ability to form color correlations according to the nature color system make it possible to name them a kind of “landscape portraits”. She is interested in portrait painting and successfully works in a still life genre. Her portraits combine figurative decision with accuracy, defined as “alike” by a satisfied commissioner and a viewer.
Light and happy feeling results from color and nature forms harmony prevailing in Elena Sayapina’s landscapes. It is probably due to her attitude to life and some biography facts as well. Those who had a chance to communicate with this artist, always notice that she is a frank and charismatic person, dowered with brilliant talent of getting on well and kindly with colleagues, friends and students. Her destiny and biography guiding star led her through the South of our large country, from Tbilisi, where she was born and at the age of 5 started to attend the art school, to Krasnodar, where she graduated from V. A. Ptashinskiy art school and then Arts Faculty of Kuban State University.
The colors of the South always help to let an artist’s sight feel at ease, clean their palette, fill their picture coloration with light, reflex, and highlight effects. V. Polenov’s Greek sketches, K. Korovin’s Crimean sketches, G. Semiradskiy’s Italian landscapes are the color polyphony brought by the bright south Sun and noticed by the professionally developed artist’s sight. And it’s not a surprise that Elena Sayapina named one of her personal exhibitions “Kuban colors” – as they have “a special stature”. She knows how to convey clarified and at the same time saturated landscape coloration of Krasnodar region and the Black Sea coast.
However, Elena Sayapina’s paintings have a multifarious color system. There is melancholy and reflection brought about by gloomy days, exalted purity, silence and calmness of the snowy winter landscapes. She quickly and accurately paints from nature. These professional painter skills are basics for successful conveying the originality of a total color state of nature and its colors involvement in the coloration interaction between light and air. It is swift work, “passing glance” as impressionists interpret it, that gives an artist the opportunity to see and to render this unique beauty of Color. And according to A. Zverev, painting development perspectives lie in the painting speed increasing.
The accuracy of Elena Sayapina’s painting image construction leads to the dab invariability and initial sonority, that’s why there is no need to repaint once made parts of the image. Such medium provides purity and verified brightness of the paints on canvas, thus paints don’t change for a long time – don’t get dark or fade, the process, which a colorful layer of a painting tends to undergo. It is oil painting that Elena prefers. Free painting with a wide brush and expressive dab texture that forms undertone and light is one of her style features. The academic principles, that she uses properly, fit nature and a concept; so all this painting “kitchen” isn’t visible to viewers. They can see a real artistic imagery of something that has always been close, but concealed the exultation of the colors and shapes harmony.
There is something in Elena Sayapina’s painting that always attracts art colleagues’ attention. Besides, she is always interesting for viewers, who are eager to feel the color harmony, nature beauty, light and happiness, which were born in the artist’s heart as a result of her dialogue with nature and then professionally conveyed onto the canvas. Take a chance to visit Elena Sayapina’s exhibitions, look through this album attentively and you will get such a feeling too!
Painting department professor Y. Korobko