Elena Kartintseva — Artist & Printmaker, London

Walk about. Lost player — etching in ochre, gold and deep red: an ostrich and rider with mallets raised, emerging from a speckled ground — Walk about. Lost player etching · from the series *Walk About*

Walk About imagines a game of ostrich‑polo, played somewhere in the Australian outback and watched through the eyes of a little girl who has lost her way. Each plate is inked in many colours at once, so no two pulls of the same image are ever alike.

The Game. Onlooker — etching in cream, rust and orange: riders on ostriches mid-game, a spectator among them — The Game. Onlooker etching · from the series *Walk About*

Etching in dusty pink and gold: a falling ostrich above a small girl, both drawn in a dense dot matrix — Untitled etching · shown at the Woolwich Contemporary Print Fair

In series

Celestial relations

Etchings on grief and the inevitable end — a farewell rehearsed in advance, the highs and lows of a life drawn as waves.

Hargila

The endangered Marabou storks of the Boragaon landfill in Guwahati, India. The wasteland they inhabit is transformed, plate by plate, into landscape — in hope of the wetland’s recovery.

About

Portrait of Elena Kartintseva in front of a shelf of art books

Elena Kartintseva is an academically trained painter and illustrator. She studied at the Moscow State Academy of Print, taking her MA in Fine Art with distinction, and has exhibited since 1996 in galleries and museums including the National Centre for Contemporary Arts in Russia and the Brunel Museum in London. Her works are held in private and public collections around the world.

She lives and works in London, where she prints at Thames‑Side Print Studios in Woolwich. Her etchings begin with a soft‑ground roller that lays down a chaotic matrix of dots; with brush, needle and tiny inking spatulas she coaxes many colours from a single plate — etching moving steadily towards painting. The images that emerge are curious, cut‑off compositions, like stills from a film: fictional stories told in colour, in which the subject becomes the symbol of a state of mind.

Works & enquiries

Original etchings are available through Thames‑Side Print Studios, Woolwich, London. Elena also shows at the Imprint Art Fair (formerly the Woolwich Contemporary Print Fair) and on Artsy.