Elly Hadjipateras

Born in London but of Greek heritage, Elly has been drawing and painting since early childhood. It was not until she did a small portrait of her niece thirty years ago that she started to see the possibility of portraiture as a full time career. From that first painting she began to receive commissions from friends and family and then the wider community. However after fifteen years, she began to feel that she wanted to change direction and work on her own projects which would offer her more freedom and creativity.

She began to paint whatever she found beautiful around her, landscapes, flowers, figures but again she felt there was a lack of consistency in her work and that she had yet to find her voice. It was not until a gallery owner came to her home and pointed out this inconsistency suggesting that Elly start to speak her truth and find her style that she began to really flourish and mature as an artist and produce work that mirrored her own unique perspective, life experience, identity and values. By this time her two daughters were young adults and Elly was beginning to be aware of the immense pressures they and their peers faced in their lives. Her work began to reflect her realisation that although young women outwardly seemed to have immense choice and freedom the overwhelming presence of social media and the pressure to conform  distorted their individual sense of self and self worth.

There is a feeling of melancholy and confusion in the women depicted in Elly’s work. She fuses ethereal beauty with more menacing motifs of nature, decaying flowers, abstract shapes that engulf the central figure creating a disturbing ambiguity between beauty and menace. The figure is not the whole story, these are not merely portraits, they depict a world of complexity, ambiguity and mental anguish. The faces are based on her daughters and their friends but she is not striving for a likeness and the shapes and backgrounds are taken entirely from imagination and are given equal importance. She works primarily in oil and starts from the eyes working outwards as she feels the expression in the eyes are what establishes the mood which will draw in the viewer.

Elly has exhibited extensively in the UK including the Royal Society of  Portrait Painters and the Royal Society of British Artists at the Mall galleries in London.