Helen
ELLIOTT
vibrant, joyful, memorable
Contemporary, Collectable Welsh Art
THE LOVE OF COLOUR, a love of the small daily things of life , and sharing the sheer joy of paint, are the reasons I make art. It's totally my thing.
Almost as much my thing as are simple pleasures of life ... the dog walk, the first snowdrops, the geese on the estuary, the perfect cup of tea, lunch with a friend...
"Colour is everything. When colour is right, form is right." - Marc Chagall.
I remember being completely in love with colour as early as 8 years old when my Uncle George (he who had been a desert rat, and in his 70’s still sported a rather dapper pencil moustache) presented me with a tin box of watercolours.
They were a thrill to behold! A dazzling array of row upon row of jewel-like lemons, fuchsias, and turquoises. It seemed to my eight-year-old self that I was in heaven and held the key to artistic bliss in my hands. However, this was in fact the first time I was to experience creative disappointment. The colours, when applied with a rough black bristle brush to thin newsprint paper, were lifeless. The paper wore through as I tried to apply increasing layers of the insipid colours to achieve some of the tin’s promised lustre.
After so many years I still vividly remember both the anticipation and disappointment of that event. And it's been my lifelong mission to find colour that satisfies. I think I'm almost there.
about
Thank you for your interest in my work. I’m an artist and teacher based in West Wales and the Yorkshire Wolds, UK.
After being asked to leave the art class at school and told that I couldn’t paint, I developed my painting style, influenced by the Fauvists and the Scottish Colourists, working intuitively with colour and composition. Narrative, use of colour and a flat plane give the work its style. The world I depict is familiar, relatable and joyful and I hope viewers connect to this.
During my thirty years as an artist, my work has become widely collected, have paintings in the permanent collections of the Welsh Assembly and MOMA Wales, have been included in the "Who's Who in Art" and have painted many commissions for public as well as private buyers.
Career highlights include- a solo show at The Museum of Naive Art in Paris 2012, and Artist in Residence at Vallauris, Cannes, 2015. Also in 2015 I was selected to be one of Golden Artists Paints artist-educators, training in New Orleans with them, then in 2018 I was invited to hold a solo show at MOMA Wales, showing alongside Welsh greats such as Sir Kyffyn Williams and Josef Herman.
