BIO

b. 1997, Los Angeles USA

Elinor Shapiro is a mixed media painter whose works capture the complexity of human relationship and emotion. Born in 1997 Los Angeles USA, she attended a special education academy for the final seven years of her pre university education. This time in her life was incredibly influential to her art, as it was both a most enlightening and a terribly traumatic experience. The school environment exposed her to both the best and the worst of human psychology, watching friends go from genius to psychotic. Seeing the swells of depression consume creativity and suicidal tendencies eating away at brilliance, the vast variation of the human psyche and how it relates and communicates with others. Elinor’s work explores the multifaceted experience of being human and being different. 

Her painting practice is both impulsive and aggressive, she layers charcoal, chalk, spray paint, acrylic paint, and oil paint to create intense portraits of emotion. The eyes in her portraits are often left unpainted or abstracted in some form, representing a more internal study and self reflection than a view outward. She also incorporates the written word into her paintings pulling from her own learning disability struggles. Spelling and writing have been one of the things she has struggled with throughout her life, and she reclaims these ‘mistakes’ by allowing them to shine within her paintings. Her work stems from her schooling experiences but continues to grow as she travels, pulling inspiration from the differing forms of communication from culture to culture, and person to person.