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Helen Santelli

Helen Santelli
Early Spring Light, oil on canvas
Helen Santelli’s landscapes, and to some extent her interior scenes as well, are anything but conventional representations, maintaining as they do a delicate balance between perceived reality and abstract design.  Although the naturalistic components of each scene are recognizable, their relationships in the overall image are enigmatic.  Some of the elements are larger than life and magnified out of proportion to others.  They overlap and are juxtaposed in ways that deny perspectival depth, creating a claustrophobic pictorial space which denies us a natural “edge” or compositional limit. We experience a dreamlike setting which mixes recognition with an overall sense of something foreign and disjointed.  Similarly, the light which peeps through leaves, vines, foliage and trunks is anything but natural – blood red or midnight blue in hue – and the light which illuminates the foreground, as in the lower right corner of Life and Death, bleaches color in the manner of an over-exposed photograph.

The cumulative result of Santelli’s “manneristic” color and compositional devices is a scene as much surreal as real. Santelli’s landscapes present us a natural world which has an animus of its own and which aggressively forbids us entry. Although it invites us at times to an almost microscopic examination, it warns us that too close inspection may reveal things which we really don’t want to know.

Helen Santelli
Life and Death
The cumulative result of Santelli’s “manneristic” color and compositional devices is a scene as much surreal as real. Santelli’s landscapes present us a natural world which has an animus of its own and which aggressively forbids us entry. Although it invites us at times to an almost microscopic examination, it warns us that too close inspection may reveal things which we really don’t want to know.

An artist of considerable versatility, Helen practices as both a painter and a sculptor.  She attended Pratt Institute and Syracuse University, receiving her Bachelors of Fine Arts, and she received her MFA from Rochester Institute of Technology.  She has exhibited extensively throughout New York state and has received numerous awards.  Helen lives in Lyons, New York.

 


Helen Santelli
Along the Canal

Helen Santelli
Apple Tree and Grape Vines

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