Elena Santonja

Elena Santonja comes from a family of artists: her great-grandfather was the painter Eduardo Rosales, her father was also a painter, her sister Carmen, apart from painting, was music (Vainica Doble) and her husband was the film director and writer Jaime de Armiñán.
She studied at the School of Fine Arts of San Fernando in Madrid, being a classmate of painters such as Luis Feito, Lucio Muñoz, Antonio López or Manuel Alcorlo, and graduated in 1955, participating in exhibitions thereafter. She was a painter who has practiced with equal talent oil painting, pastel, pencil drawing, ink, engraving and the creation of objects, and even the design of wallpapers. As for his artistic career, it has been characterized from its beginnings to the end, by an alternation between figuration and abstraction that has been configuring its different stages, being the set of all his works of striking variety that show his great imagination and his predilection for different themes. In fact, Elena, in addition to her taste for the artistic and decorative world, was a great admirer of the natural sciences, which is why she made many landscapes, mushroom drawings and bird paintings, such as the one in this collection. The exhibition of paintings of birds was in the 90s, being large oil paintings of exotic birds (toucans, cranes, herons, parrots, penguins, flamingos, etc.) framed in the foreground within their natural environments, in bright colors that, far from representing mere animals, constitute portraits of winged beings that observe us from the other side of the canvas. In his last years he continued to paint small abstracts of bright colors that show his joy for life, something that lasted forever.