Elena Degenhardt is best known for her immersive, color intense, large scale waterscapes and underwater figurative works and emotionally charged portraits. She creates realistic paintings with an impressionistic touch in pastel, charcoal, oil, acrylic and mixed media. Her application of pastel and charcoal is done in a painterly way, often in washes, on unusual painting surfaces (including product packaging), while pushing the boundaries of these dry mediums.

Elena Degenhardt's pastels in her upcoming solo show titled "Moments of Being" are the artist’s exploration of the ways light changes the usual appearance of our experience with things we encounter. She explores how light adds poetry and deeper meaning to the everyday, mundane life, transforming it in what writer Virginia Woolf called “moments-of-being”. Light transcends visual representation, delving into the metaphysical realm of thoughts, physical sensations and ambivalent emotions. Degenhardt says: “I have spent the past year, immersed in the mesmerising exploration of the interplay of light, water and human form in pastel. I hope these works hold some fleeting moments of acute awareness of beauty, fragility, interconnectedness and of transience of everything.”