Elaine's profile
Elaine Weiner-Reed is an award-winning artist, inspirational speaker, and visionary. She earned an M.A. from Middlebury College, Vermont, and a B.A. and B.S. in French from West Chester University, Pennsylvania. Weiner-Reed earned signature artist status in the Baltimore (Lifetime Signature Member), Potomac Valley, and Georgia Watercolor Societies. She is a Nautilus Signature Member of and is on the International Society of Experimental Artists Scholarship and Facebook Committees. She retired from a tandem U.S. Government career where she served with integrity for 36 years as professionalized multi-disciplined linguist, analyst, editor, and leader. She capped off her 40-plus years of public and government service in 2022 leveraging her strategic-thinking skills as Deputy Senior Language Authority for U.S. Cyber Command, assisting policymakers update and strengthen DOD governance and policies. Weiner-Reed 's qualifications include panelist, juror, lecturer, blogger, writer, mentor, and educator. She authored, illustrated, and published four children’s books on Amazon in 2020. Leaving things better than she found them is a core value.
Throughout her 40+ year art career, Weiner-Reed has distinguished herself as an abstract artist with uncommon vision. Weiner-Reed has consistently developed depth and diversity of art portfolios, expertise, and credentials since the 1980’s: She mastered first classical oil painting (1980’s), then moved on to explore watercolors and watermedia on paper (1990’s-2005), embracing acrylics and latex on unstretched and stretched canvas (2005-current). Her torn canvas bas-relief series and her stone carving experience in Myslenice, Poland (2014) heralded her return to sculpture. Since 2017, Weiner-Reed has been painting and creating plaster and metal figurative sculptures, as well as welding more than 12 metal and found-object music-inspired assemblages.
Weiner-Reed shoulders her role as an artist in society as a public trust. While she has painted interior murals in the past, her path expanded when in 2017 during her second EU-funded international artist residency, she was hand-selected to a 6-person international artist team charged by the Myslenice Town Council to spray-paint a public mural along the city’s Interstate. Since 2018, she has been focusing on public art projects as a way of engaging and integrating art within communities. Officially entering the public art domain in the United States, she was awarded an Maryland State Arts Council (MSAC) Public Art Across Maryland (PAAM) Planning Grant as Lead Artist on a campaign of inclusion for Seniors with her “Lives Well Lived” project. She was awarded an MSAC Creativity Grant (November 2022) for her “Spirited Women” portrait project.
Believing “art is an action word,” Weiner-Reed treats others with respect and kindness and donates a portion of art sales to charity. In 2023 her "Family Tree" Public Art initiative was embraced by the Severn Senior Center and since August 2023, she has taught four identity-focused mask-making workshops there. Her “Every Painting is a Song (Story)” cross-disciplinary creativity initiative grew out of her commitment to ignite the imaginations of others and foster community interaction and dialogue. Volunteering her time creatively engaging with the community is another of her core values. Her artwork has been featured in international exhibitions in China, Hong Kong, India, Italy, Spain, France, Poland, Canada, and over 80 international, national, and regional group shows – including three solo and two group shows in Chelsea, NYC. Her work is in public (Poland), corporate (U.S.), museum (Italy), and private collections (43) in Europe and throughout the U.S. Weiner-Reed is a Lifetime Signature Artist in the Baltimore Watercolor Society (BWS), as well as the Potomac Valley and Georgia Watercolor Societies. She holds Nautilus Fellowship Signature status in the International Society of Experimental Artists (ISEA) and serves on its Scholarship and Public Facebook Committees. She was selected to serve as a Panelist reviewing 2024 Public and Conservation Grant applications under the guidelines and auspices of the MSAC PAAM program.
ARTIST STATEMENT
Beauty | Beast - A Revolution of Identity
“In imperfection, lies reality, beauty, and character.”
What distinguishes us, defines us.
What defines us, connects us.
My art is created to selectively reveal or conceal emotions and storylines, the implied content in a scenario communicated through form, gestural strokes, colors, and other design elements. My creative process involves analyzing and then building a character in layers, mimicking the way in which identities are formed throughout a lifetime: layer by colorful or complex layer. In my sculptures, I explore the physicality of those layers. In my paintings, I let the form and placement of figures imply subsurface content and emotion. In my figurative sculptures, I juxtapose strength and inner beauty with vulnerability and external imperfections.
Highlighting the imperfect in a world that embraces limited definitions of beauty, my goal is to challenge those perceptions and open the door to redefining “beauty” in the 21st Century. My creative process involves analyzing and building characters in layers, mimicking the way identities are formed throughout a lifetime: layer by colorful, complex layer.
I love the physicality of painting and sculpting. I approach each piece with anticipation, hope, and joy, knowing that new discoveries await me. Entering my studio, I turn on music and tune into intuition and emotions. I move around each work in an improvisational dance, the moods, gestures, and energy uniquely connecting me with each piece. As I splash, pour, draw, and sculpt with paint and plaster, I tune out the world.
Focused on individuals impacted by transience and human frailty, my figurative works juxtapose strength and inner beauty with vulnerability and external imperfections. I let the form and placement of figures imply subsurface content. People and relationships matter to me. No two are the same. Their stories of survival are an endless source of inspiration. I see beauty in humans as they are – each individual a unique and multifaceted three-dimensional tableau.
My paintings are created to selectively reveal or conceal emotions and storylines. Monuments to life, my figurative works resurrect feelings of transcendence, mystery, and hope. My welded metal assemblage series “Visual Acoustics” has music as its very reason for being. These reimagined musical instruments defy traditional limits, their forms morphing to their own rhythms as strings break free to dance in the wind as the music plays on. My non-objective and graffiti-inspired paintings are intuitive and visceral responses to life, events, and everything intangible. In color and line, they convey emotions and impressions too vivid to express figuratively.
