Damian Elwes

Dusan Damian Cary Elwes (born 10 August 1960) is a British artist with studios in Los Angeles and the Colombian rainforest.

His paintings explore themes such as the cycle of life and creativity.

In the early 1980s, Elwes lived in New York, where he was an early exponent of graffiti.

There he met Keith Haring who encouraged Elwes to start painting.

Some of his first paintings were chosen by the eminent London art dealer, Robert Fraser, to be included in a graffiti exhibition with Jean-Michel Basquiat at the Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburgh, 11 August – 23 September 1984.

In 1986, in Jordan, Elwes married firstly Christina Oxenberg, daughter of Princess Elizabeth of Yugoslavia and Howard Oxenberg.

They had no children.

In 1988, Elwes and his first wife, Christina Oxenberg, bought land in southern Colombia overlooking a rain forest and spent five years building a house there.

In 1996, Elwes married secondly Lewanne Collie, with whom he has two children: a daughter, Cosima Cary Elwes (born 1997), and a son, Aubrey Bede Elwes (born 2000).

A floor painting, Fallen Tree (1997) describes the cycle of life in one of the last surviving forests of mahogany.

In a clearing in the forest, one old tree has fallen to the ground and is decaying.

New saplings can be seen growing from the dead tree.

This same cycle exists in painting and in all forms of innovation.

So, while this work might be seen as a spur for conscience, it also contains an indication of Elwes' confidence in the power and continuity of creativity.

By 1998, Elwes had returned to live there with his second wife, Lewanne.

He has created four vast, interactive paintings which viewers can walk around inside.

These artworks can be monumental and three-dimensional, such as a painting in which visitors walk from room to room on the ground floor of the "Villa La Californie" (2006–2018), to witness the extent of Pablo Picasso's creativity in April, 1956 or an immense landscape painting on the ground, Amazon (1999), on which visitors can walk above the exotic, flowering plants of a cloud forest and search for the source of the river.

A documentary, Inside Picasso's Studio (2006, by Marina Zenovich) follows Elwes as he creates a vast painting describing the various studios on the ground floor of Picasso's Villa La Californie, as they were in April 1956.

The painting wraps around several walls and viewers are able to walk from room to room while examining hundreds of Picasso's artworks in progress.

Curator Fred Hoffman wrote, "While we, the viewer, are immediately intrigued and invited to partake of these historical moments, what actually sustains, even heightens our interest, is Damian Elwes' ability to turn documentation and historical record into compelling pictorial visions requiring repeated viewing and constant deciphering. Elwes' concern for historical accuracy, and his subsequent investigative process enable his fully realized paintings to have a freshness and immediacy which none of the source material contains nor conveys. It is not, therefore, the fact that he has painted Picasso’s studio that makes Elwes' work of interest. Rather, it is his ability to use the historical source material about Picasso to achieve some immediacy for his own concerns as a painter. In the end, it is the expressive quality of these works that we feel drawn to."

In London, 2010, Elwes exhibited an even larger floor painting about the origin of life.

That artwork depicts a primary source of the Amazon River which exists at the summit of a Colombian volcano called Puracé.

The painting was placed under plexiglass in the gallery and visitors could walk all over it.

For the surrounding walls, Elwes created contemporary cave paintings of a woman asleep in that exotic ecosystem.

In 2018, the Musée en Herbe in Paris hosted "Secrets of the Studio, from Claude Monet to Ai Weiwei," a retrospective of Elwes' Artist Studio paintings.

These paintings transport viewers directly into the worlds of creative geniuses from the 19th century to the present.

More than one hundred thousand people attended his immersive and interactive exhibition.

Visitors could walk through Picasso's Villa in Cannes or roam around in a VR painting of Brancusi's original Montparnasse workshop.

Elwes was born in London into a family of artists.

His father Dominick Elwes and grandfather Simon Elwes were portrait painters.

Both died when Elwes was fifteen and left him easels and brushes.

His mother was the interior designer and socialite Tessa Kennedy.

He has two brothers, Cary Elwes, an actor, and Cassian Elwes, an independent film producer.

His ability in Mathematics helped him gain a place at Harvard University.

At graduation, his play-writing professor gave him a palette knife that had once belonged to Henri Matisse.

He went to Paris where, for two years, he made paintings of the studios of contemporary artists as a way to learn from them.