Elena Lawrence is an artist based in Bountiful, Utah, and a native of Salt Lake City. She grew up with art materials always within reach, supplied by parents and teachers who encouraged her early on. As an adult, she took a watercolor class at the Petersen Art Center, where she developed her painting and drawing skills over several years — entering pieces in the Utah State Fair and earning ribbons each time, including a blue ribbon. That encouragement led her husband to enroll her at Salt Lake Community College, where she began pursuing an art degree in earnest.

At both SLCC and the University of Utah, she was introduced to a wide range of mediums — oil, acrylic, metal sculpture, encaustic, and print — and embraced each one. Her work was juried into several student shows, and she received two scholarships along the way. Elena graduated Magna Cum Laude from the University of Utah in 2017 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts, with an emphasis in Painting and Drawing.

Nine years out from her degree, Elena's work has kept moving. She still returns to collage and oil & cold wax, but watercolor has taken on a bigger role in her practice, and it's become the clearest window into how she thinks as a painter today.

She rarely works from a photograph if she can help it — there's a rockier coastline, a European village lane, a stretch of countryside she'd rather sit down in front of and study directly. Wherever she travels, she's reading the scene in front of her: where the light is coming from, what it does to the shadows, how the shapes underneath it all fit together. A painting idea can arrive as a full scene all at once, or it can narrow down to one small thing — a window, a rooftop, a hillside, a house set against a burst of color — and by the time she's settled on her subject, she's usually already mixing colors in her head.

Old surfaces hold a particular pull for her: stone worn smooth, faded paint, ironwork gone soft with rust, anything that carries visible time. She's also partial to things that reflect — water, glass, a wet street — anywhere the painting can hold two images at once. And her canvases don't stay one size in scope: a wide, hazy coastal view might sit alongside a tightly cropped study of a single doorway, both coming from the same instinct to slow down and really look.

Elena has shown her work at galleries, art festivals, and juried events around Utah and beyond.