Hagler Gallery

Elana Hagler was born in Tel Aviv, Israel, and immigrated to the United States at the age of five. She received her Bachelor of Arts in both Studio Art and Psychology from Brandeis University, Boston, and continued her studies for two years at the Master Class of the Jerusalem Studio School and in Umbria, Italy. She then received her Master of Fine Arts from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia. Elana has won multiple prizes in painting and drawing and has exhibited her work across the United States and internationally. She has taught fine art at Cornell College, the Delaware College of Art and Design and at Swarthmore College. She lives and teaches in Montgomery, Alabama, and is a staff writer for the popular art blog Painting Perceptions.

My love for painting and drawing started at a young age, when many of my classmates would take the time to sit for me. I have always been intensely interested in people, their likenesses, their experiences, and the attempt to capture and distill their essence. My fascination with understanding people on a deeper level led me to major in Psychology in addition to Studio Art. I am enthralled by the greatest and most mysterious examples of portraiture in the past, including the work of Degas, Velázquez, Goya, and Pontormo, as well as the Egyptian Fayum portraits and ancient Roman Frescoes. In this day and age of constantly being confronted with a multiplicity of flickering images, what a profound experience it is to truly see and be seen.

My still-life paintings hold layers of meaning for me. They are formal inventions, engaged in the play of opposites including the juxtaposition of the intimacy of familial objects and books with the monumentality of architectural construction. At the same time, the objects are both vessels of memory and stand-ins for those who made the deepest marks upon my life.

Painting the landscape is my path to being fully present in the moment. I seek out the color harmonies and formal rhythms which play through the world like underlying melodies. The world has had more than enough of sorrow. I seek solace through the pursuit of my idiosyncratic sense of beauty.