Helga Stentzel is a very clever woman. She is a London-based Russian-born artist. It took a while for her to develop her Clothing Line Animals, which is a series of fine art photographs. The idea for the series appears to have started when, “I saw a sock on the floor next to some pegs and realised that it looked like a horse’s head”. She was talking to Creative Boom. Stentzel publishes her fine art photographs on Instagram and she sells the fine art images on her online shop. Her images currently cost £200 each. The proceeds of sale of her white dove image will be donated to charities helping Ukraine during this current, horrible conflict.
She has made a big effort to select perfectly suited backgrounds. I’ll assume that they are added in at the photo-editing stage in a technically very competent way.
She photographs other household items in a creative way. She calls the images ‘Household Surrealism’. And ‘documenting the brighter side of the mundane’. Stentzel won the award for Food Art Creator of the Year in 2020. She’s worked in the advertising industry and ran a children’s clothing business prior to becoming a full-time artist.
She says that she started doing creative photography on Instagram about six years ago. It started off with projects with children and then developed into more adult-orientated work. She likes the fact that she can turn the mundane, ordinary objects with which we are so familiar into something visually special. She succeeds tremendously well. I have seen nothing quite like it and I’m sure the same applies to other people.
She’s also created animals out of food and her titles for the artworks are also imaginative and clever. For example, in a picture of a flat-faced dog (very popular at the moment) made out of sliced bread she calls the artwork “Brad Pet”. She said that she likes “noticing playful similarities – be it a sweater on a clothing line looking like a horse or a slice of bread resembling a dog’s head. It’s only the starting point, though. From this moment onward, the stories and visuals start buzzing in my head.”
Clearly Stentzel is very imaginative which is a great quality and a quality that many people don’t possess including me.
I would recommend a visit to her Instagram page which you can see by clicking on this link.
