5 Questions For Elena Caravela
How has your upbringing or background influenced your current work or series?
Hindsight is indeed brilliant. Looking back on my body of work, understanding facial expression and human gesture was always an integral part of my work. As it was in my childhood...
I am of a generation whose immigrant family believed that it was not wise to grow up speaking the language of parental immigrants. Instead, my siblings and I were taught to enmesh ourselves only in English. Therefore we often found ourselves as outsiders around extended family. We sat quietly by and struggled to find context in the conversation by paying close attention to gestures and facial expression. Hence my fascination with the human face and figure remains my greatest interest.
My current series attempts to mark with paint some of the emotions, conflicts and awakenings of an individual undergoing psychoanalysis. I have always been interested in the methods of psychoanalysis. My daughter is a psychoanalyst and we have discussed theories of what constitutes treatment in psychoanalysis. Because I have also always painted gestures of vulnerability, this current series dovetails with my fascination of human communication.
How do you select the subjects or models you paint?
My models are often family, friends and students who are kind enough to allow their likeness to be duplicated and used as I see fit. For me, I must know the people I paint, to feel a connection to them. While I maintain a deep connection to wildlife and the wilderness, I never feel the need to explore nature in paint. I’m content with the mysteries therein. Only humanity moves me to continuously investigate our connections to one other.
How do you relay emotion in your work?
Color, texture and of course the gesture of face and figure bring human emotion and experience intuitively to a majority of human beings, therefore I consciously concentrate on these elements.
Which colors must you have in your palette before starting a painting?
I always have the Zorn palette colors on my palette; white, yellow ochre, raw umber, cadmium red light and black with an indulgence of alizarin crimson.
What is the best advice you have received in your career?
Flip your work upside down, or use a mirror behind you, or take photos while working. All of these methods force the brain to let your eyes do the work and see in a new way what needs to change in a piece and which elements are working. It never fails. I run into trouble if I forget to employ these methods.
