Elana Kundell

Elana Kundell creates imaginary environments that are based on emotional rather than physical spaces. Music, playing a tremendously important role in her paintings, has been inspiration for her wishing to produce pure and transcendental art. By listening to music and interpreting it in her work, she has discovered unconventional techniques in her art-creating approach. Working in oil on panel and also canvas, she develops the surfaces intuitively using knives, brushes, fingers, and cloth to form dense, intersecting layers. As a result her paintings occupy an ambiguous zone between what is seen and what is felt. 

Elana Kundell’s artwork has been exhibited in various venues, including the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) in Los Angeles, CA for the Fresh! Art Auction, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) Artists Gallery, the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah, and in numerous galleries in the United States and in Korea. She has received grants including a residency at the Vermont Studio Center, and three Ventura Music Festival commissions. Among collectors of her art are former MOCA President Charles E Young, Ellie Blankfort, Drug Policy Alliance Founder Ethan Nadelmann, and the University of California Study Center, Italy.

Kundell studied art at the University of California at Santa Cruz as well as Painting and Sculpture at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Bologna, Italy. She is a member of the Los Angeles Art Association and has been an Artist-In-Residence at Studio Channel Islands Art Center in Camarillo, CA since 2005.