Elena Behrakis

Elena Behrakis (b.1970; Lowell, MA. United States) is a Greek American visual artist who works primarily in oil on canvas, paper and board. Her highly expressive figurative works are characterized by their rich texture, energy, and visible brushstrokes and marks. Elena’s style of painting is intuitive heightening the emotion in her pieces. The works are her direct relation to insulation, strength, invisibility, radiance, and vulnerability within the female experience.

With an extensive training in classical figurative art from Boston University and Yale University’s Norfolk School of Art, Elena strives to grasp the essence of complex human emotions and physicality through color, light and gesture. She works in such a way that there is no opportunity to create a formula, as each mark is an unexpected reaction to her mind overflowing onto the canvas. Paintings are often turned on their sides to explore more surprising compositions and sometimes awkward fluidity of lines.

After graduate school, Elena stepped away from creating art and spent many years building several businesses within the beauty industry, as well as expanding her family. Prior to her break, her work was shown in galleries and shows throughout parts of the United States.

In 2024, Elena traveled back to her roots of artistic expression with an incredible urge to paint. Her mind was flooded with ideas, images, thoughts and ideologies. Shadows, landscapes, and figures started to emerge and dissolve into one another.

Late diagnoses in ADHD and Synesthesia play integral roles in the process of her work. The inquisitive, guttural, and instinctual ways she responds to each work allows for a pureness in thought and reaction. Repeatedly building up and then destroying each layer is an integral part of her process and allows for an excavation of the tangibility of each piece as well as the human soul. Inspired by the Bay Area Figurative, Nabis, Expressionist and Brut Art movements, Elena’s work challenges to dissect and navigate towards poetic allusions, the Ancient Greek philosophy of Eudaimonia, and the raw human emotions that fluctuate between lightness, surface, depth and darkness. 

Elena currently lives and works in Massachusetts. Her work can now be seen in exhibitions across the United States.