Yelenok Tat’jana D. was born and grown up in the Maryanskiy farm village in the Krasnodar Krai, the father was the head of a kolkhoz. After the death of her parents she got into an orphanage and finished a seven-year school. From 1943 to 1948, she studied in a special school of communication networks, then was employed as a technician in a telegraph office in Moscow. She has loved needlework, embroidery and knitting since childhood. After moving first to Krasnodar and subsequently to Moscow, where she works as a telephone and telegraph operator, she began to paint in oils.
She had her first one-woman show in 1972 in Moscow during the World Student Games. She paints from memory and as imagination dictates, revealing a manifest connection with folklore, but of a present-day vintage. Her favourite sub-ject, often repeated, is related in one way or another to the Soviet electrification scheme. She also borrows themes from fairy tales and from modern poetry. Also observable in her work are features characteristic of a child’s vision of the world, as well as the reflection of ideals cherished by people of village stock who settled in the cities and assimilated urban aesthetic tastes through books, magazine illustrations, the cinema and the like.
Ambitious and eager for recognition, she has been represented at several group exhibitions and had works reproduced in periodicals; she also has works on view in the Suzdal Museum, where she painted a frieze.
