Location: United States
Yelena Lev-Navtikova is a multidisciplinary artist and graphic designer based in Los Angeles, originally from Minsk, Belarus, with some years in the Netherlands. With an M.A. in Architecture and a B.A. in Painting, she creates layered, surreal dreamscapes where architectural structure meets poetic symbolism. Her work often explores transformation, memory, and spiritual passage through recurring motifs such as spheres, portals, and symbolic figures. Lev-Navtikova has exhibited widely in the United States, including Laguna Art-A-Fair, San Diego, Sasse Museum of Art and the Lancaster Museum of Art and History, and internationally with Primo Piano LivinGallery in Lecce, Italy. She participated in the “Baroque Blue – Water Path” project and residency in Salento, curated by art advisor and curator Dores Sacquegna. Her works — including Confession, Guardians of the Veil, Voyage, and The Revival — were featured on ArtScreenTV and were presented at the Florence Biennale 2025 and Art Basel in Basel. She is a member of Orange County Center of Contemporary Art, the Westlake Village Art Guild, California Art League and the Association of Artists of Belarus.
My brush moves where vision softens and imagination takes flight. As a contemporary artist, I seek to distill the pulse of our time—translating the world’s shifting rhythms into visual language shaped by emotion, memory, and intuition. Working primarily in oil and acrylic, I build my surfaces through layered passages, where modern textures breathe new life into traditional mediums, allowing each painting to unfold slowly, like a lived experience.
My practice moves between two complementary modes: abstract expressionism and surreal symbolism. In my abstract works, gesture and color become vessels of raw sensation—immediate, instinctive, and unfiltered—capturing moments that exist beyond narrative or form. In contrast, my surreal symbolic paintings emerge from an inner mythology, where figurative elements, recurring motifs, and dreamlike landscapes serve as metaphors for psychological and spiritual inquiry. These images invite contemplation, offering symbols not as answers, but as open thresholds.
Across both styles, each painting becomes a refracted mirror of my inner lens. Reality is not merely observed, but transformed—reimagined through intuition and introspection. My work forms an intimate tapestry woven from perception and soul, inviting the viewer to step into a space where the seen and the unseen quietly converge.
In Timekeeper, I enter a dreamlike realm where time is no longer measured—it breathes. It bends, drifts, and watches. I imagine time as a living presence, ancient and aware, moving through all things without beginning or end.
The many-headed hare stands as a guardian between worlds. Its multiple gazes hold past, present, and becoming at once. In its arms rests a skull—not as a symbol of fear, but of wisdom earned through transformation. It speaks of death and rebirth as inseparable forces, reminders that nothing truly ends, but rather changes form.
The fish float gently through the air, freed from gravity and water alike. For me, they are souls in motion—silent travelers moving toward light, memory, and truth. The luminous spheres drift like distant suns or spiritual portals, suggesting unseen realms that exist just beyond perception. Beneath them, the cracked desert ground carries the quiet memory of creation, revealing both the fragility of life and its enduring resilience.
The sand watch measures what cannot be held. Each grain is a moment—slipping from future into memory—marking the fragile beauty of existence. Time passes not as loss, but as passage.
At the heart of this work lives love. Not loud or sentimental, but essential and eternal. Love is the force that allows the soul to move gently through time, that transforms loss into wisdom and endings into beginnings. It is love that softens mortality, that binds spirit to spirit across worlds and lifetimes. Even as moments dissolve, love remains—the unseen thread holding all transformation together, breathing continuity into the endless rhythm of becoming.
In this surreal landscape, hearts grow like trees—rooted in the earth yet reaching toward the infinite. Their branching veins echo both roots and rivers, suggesting that love, memory, and vitality are forces that nourish and sustain us across time and space. Suspended spheres drift like otherworldly planets, reminders of unseen realms and the fragile balance between body and spirit. The presence of the ravens transforms the scene into one of guardianship and mystery—figures of transition, witnesses to cycles of life and death, love and loss. The architectural thresholds in the distance invite passage, suggesting portals into deeper dimensions of the self, where the heart is both vessel and compass. The seated figure, contemplative and bare, mirrors the heart-tree in silence, embodying the eternal dialogue between human reason and the instincts of the heart. This work is a meditation on resilience and transformation. It asks: What grows when we plant our heart into the soil of experience? How do our inner landscapes mirror the cosmos above? In these entwined visions of nature, body, and spirit, the painting offers a world where the heart itself becomes the root of existence—endlessly branching, endlessly alive.
In Intuitive Passage, I paint the studio as a threshold—a place where inner vision crosses into form. The moth-headed figure is a quiet self-portrait of perception, a being guided not by logic but by instinct. Like a moth drawn to light, she moves through uncertainty by feeling her way forward, trusting an inner compass rather than a fixed map.
The desert landscape stretches wide and cracked, echoing the vulnerability of creation itself. Arches appear again and again on floating canvases, standing on fragile legs like ideas still learning how to balance. These repeating forms reflect my architectural memory, yet here their blueprints are made not of structure, but of breath, memory, and emotion. They are passages—doors that invite crossing rather than certainty.
Spheres drift through the sky as silent witnesses, symbols of inner worlds, untold possibilities, and the unseen forces that guide us. A simple bench, a cup, and a letter anchor the scene in the ordinary, reminding me that creation does not happen apart from life, but within it—between pauses, gestures, and human presence. The sneakers ground the myth in the present moment, insisting that intuition belongs not only to dreams, but to daily existence.
At the heart of this work is the understanding that love is essential. Love is the quiet force that allows intuition to exist at all — the trust to listen inward, the courage to reveal what is fragile, and the willingness to share what begins as private vision. Love is what transforms uncertainty into passage, fear into movement, and solitude into connection.
Intuitive Passage is my meditation on becoming: the moment when an inner image stops being only mine and begins to open itself to others. It is a crossing from interior dusk into a light shaped by care, vulnerability, and love — the most essential guide we have.
In Moonlight Dreamer, I explore the liminal space between dreams and consciousness, where water becomes a mirror for memory and emotion. The central figure, eyes closed and spirit open, exists in quiet communion with golden fish—symbols of intuition, transformation, and the mysteries that swim beneath the surface of our awareness.
Surrounded by swirling waves and gilded currents, she is both the dreamer and the dreamed. The fish seem to whisper ancient truths, gliding through an ethereal tide of silver and gold. This motion creates a protective, cosmic cocoon—a reminder that even in stillness, we are always in movement, always becoming.
This piece invites the viewer to drift inward, to listen to the currents of their own subconscious, and to trust the silent wisdom that arises in moonlit moments of reflection.
The Revival is one of my most emotionally resonant works—both visually powerful and deeply symbolic. When I painted it, I was channeling a vision that felt ethereal, almost otherworldly, yet rooted in something timeless and true.
The composition naturally draws the viewer’s gaze from the fore- ground into the distant horizon. The levitating spheres act like step- ping stones, guiding us into another dimension—an elevated state
of being. The symmetrical rock formations on either side felt to me like a natural cathedral, a sacred threshold between the seen and the unseen. I imagine the viewer, and myself, standing at the entrance of a portal—an initiation path—witnessing a silent, ancient ceremony of rebirth.
In "Guardians of the Veil," | explore the threshold between the seen and the unseen, the physical and the spiritual. The weathered skull-like formation rising from icy earth suggests the remnants of a forgotten world -part monument, part memory. It stands like a relic of time, a sentinel sculpted by nature and consciousness.
Three ravens, ancient symbols of mystery and transition, hover and perch above. To me, they are guardians of the liminal space, protectors of hidden truths, and witnesses to the soul's quiet unfolding. Their dark forms contrast the softness of the sky, grounding the painting in the tension between stillness and flight, silence and revelation.
This work invites contemplation of what lies just beyond the veil-where memory dissolves into myth, and the material world begins to fade into spirit.
In Ladder of Realms, I invite the viewer to journey beyond the visible — to ascend through layers of perception, memory, and spirit. The painting unfolds as a quiet pilgrimage, where five spheres rise like sacred markers through a sky of drifting clouds, each one a portal to an inner world.
Within these suspended orbs live reflections of distant corridors, ancient arcades, and dreamlike passages — fragments of realms both remembered and imagined. They hover above a serene body of water, as if emerging from the depths of consciousness, lifting the eye and the soul toward something higher, more mysterious. The rocky foreground speaks to the grounded struggle of human existence, while the ascent suggests transcendence, awakening, and the quiet order hidden within chaos.
This piece is a meditation on the spaces we carry within — the temples of thought, the sanctuaries of feeling, the silent thresholds between what we know and what we sense. Ladder of Realms is not just a climb through air and light, but a return to the architecture of the self — ever evolving, ever ascending.
“Guardians of the Divine Flight”
In Guardians of the Divine Flight, I invite the viewer into a sacred moment suspended between earth and sky. Six hooded figures stand in solemn unity—faceless, grounded, yet gazing upward—as if bearing silent witness to something greater than themselves. Their forms, sculpted in textured strokes of crimson, ochre, and shadow, embody both the weight of human experience and the flicker of spiritual awakening.
Above them, a radiant, winged presence emerges—part flame, part light—a symbol of transcendence, guidance, or perhaps the soul's release. It hovers like a divine messenger, untethered and free. This moment between the figures and the flight is the heart of the painting: the threshold between the seen and the unseen, the earthly and the infinite.
The hoods conceal identity, allowing these guardians to represent all of us in moments of quiet devotion, transformation, or reverence. They are not bound by name or time—they are protectors of mystery, keepers of the invisible truth.
This piece is a meditation on inner stillness, collective presence, and the sacredness of witnessing something beyond words.
My brush moves where vision softens and imagination takes flight. As a contemporary artist, I seek to distill the pulse of our time—translating the world’s shifting rhythms into visual language shaped by emotion, memory, and intuition. Working primarily in oil and acrylic, I build my surfaces through layered passages, where modern textures breathe new life into traditional mediums, allowing each painting to unfold slowly, like a lived experience.
My practice moves between two complementary modes: abstract expressionism and surreal symbolism. In my abstract works, gesture and color become vessels of raw sensation—immediate, instinctive, and unfiltered—capturing moments that exist beyond narrative or form. In contrast, my surreal symbolic paintings emerge from an inner mythology, where figurative elements, recurring motifs, and dreamlike landscapes serve as metaphors for psychological and spiritual inquiry. These images invite contemplation, offering symbols not as answers, but as open thresholds.
Across both styles, each painting becomes a refracted mirror of my inner lens. Reality is not merely observed, but transformed—reimagined through intuition and introspection. My work forms an intimate tapestry woven from perception and soul, inviting the viewer to step into a space where the seen and the unseen quietly converge.
In Sunset in the Park, I explore the delicate boundary between memory and reality -a fleeting moment where nature dissolves into abstraction and reflection. The vertical forms stand like sentinels of a fading day, while the shifting textures and layered tones invite the viewer into a contemplative stillness.
This piece captures the sacred hush of twilight in a forested space, where the sun's final glow transforms the ordinary into the ethereal. It is a meditation on impermanence, on how beauty resides not just in what we see, but in what we feel passing through us, like light between trees.
In Confession, two fish surface in the foreground, formed by heavy strokes of brown, ochre, white, and hints of red. Their wide, exposed eyes convey vulnerability and quiet alertness. Behind them, ghostlike fish and drifting eyes dissolve into a layered, turbulent background, evoking water as memory, emotion, and subconscious space. Dripping paint and dense textures create the sensation of peering into a submerged inner world.
Earthy tones—rust, cream, and weathered browns—suggest age and timelessness, while the darkened lower register pulls the viewer toward depth and hidden truths. The tactile surface vibrates with movement, as if thought and feeling are constantly shifting beneath the surface.
The fish symbolize transformation, spiritual passage, and submerged truth. In Confession, revelation becomes an act of love: the courage to surface, to be seen, and to remain open despite exposure. The two central figures move together through uncertainty, suggesting empathy, connection, and shared vulnerability.
Eyes recur throughout the composition, suggesting introspection and witnessing—yet the gaze is not only one of judgment, but also of compassion. The emotional tone is introspective and uneasy, yet tender, framing truth as a human gesture of honesty, care, and love.
In Caprice, I embrace the unpredictable nature of inspiration itself—wild, fluid, and untamed. This painting is a meditation on spontaneity and the mysterious rhythms that move us from within. The upward surge of light and color suggests a sudden breakthrough, like emotion or memory erupting from the unconscious.
I worked intuitively, letting the forms take shape as if guided by the forces of water and fire. The swirling blues evoke the ocean’s depth and fluidity, while sparks of gold and orange hint at inner illumination. This contrast mirrors the interplay of chaos and clarity, turmoil and revelation.
Caprice is not about control, but release—an invitation to surrender to the moment, to the beauty of chance, and to the unseen currents that carry us toward transformation.
Voyage is a meditation on transitions—between places, identities, and states of consciousness. The figures in the painting appear both ancient and ephemeral, like guardians of a forgotten path or pilgrims crossing a sea of memory. I used layered textures and shifting forms to evoke the feeling of moving through fog, uncertainty, and the unknown.
The central arch represents a portal—a moment of crossing into something deeper, more intuitive. Reflections blur the boundaries between sky and water, suggesting the spiritual nature of all journeys. This work is an homage to the invisible bridges we walk—between the self and the soul, the present and the eternal.
“Cliff” is a meditation on the resilience of stillness amid turbulence. In this work, I explore the quiet defiance of a solitary cliff standing against the fury of a changing sky. The textures echo erosion and time, while the moody palette speaks to inner storms and moments of stark clarity. At the heart of the chaos, a small glimmer of blue suggests hope, memory, or spirit—something untouched and enduring. This piece invites the viewer to contemplate what remains unshaken when all else is swept away.
In Love Remains Through Time, I reflect on the quiet endurance of the heart. Working in an abstract expressionist language shaped by more than twenty years of artistic practice, I build layered textures and flowing drips that echo the passage of memory—tears, rain, and time itself. The glowing heart forms carry love’s radiance forward, suggesting a presence that persists beyond any single moment.
For me, love is not fixed or static; it unfolds as a continuum, moving through light and shadow, joy and loss. This work becomes a meditation on the timeless thread of human connection—one that time may transform, but never erase.
Voyagers is a meditation on the unknown paths we take -across time, memory, and unseen realms. The floating spheres symbolize souls, ideas, or energies in transit, quietly navigating the liminal spaces between destruction and renewal. Layers of texture and color blend the elements of sky and land, inner and outer, to evoke a place beyond geography- a spiritual or cosmic landscape.
This work invites reflection on what it means to move forward without a map, to trust the pull of the unseen, and to find beauty in the silence of becoming.
Walking Man shows a person moving forward through a stormy, emotional world. The swirling shapes and dark colors around him reflect the struggles we all go through in life—moments of confusion, fear, and pain. But in the middle of this chaos, there is a calm, bright space, like a quiet place inside the storm.
The small figure walking through it all represents strength, hope, and the courage to keep going, even when the way is unclear. The red shapes suggest pain or challenges, and the touches of gold stand for guidance, hope, or something greater helping us along the way.
This painting is about not giving up. It’s a reminder that even in the darkest times, we can take one step at a time toward something better.
“Time Keeper”
“Heart Garden”
“Intuitive Passage”
“Moonlight Dreamer”
“The Revival”
“Guardians of the Veil”
“Ladder of Realms”
“Sunset”
“Confession”
“Caprice”
“Voyage”
“Cliff”
“Love Falling Through Time”
“Voyagers”
“Walking Man”
