Ken Elias grew up in Utica and attended Utica College and then the New York School of Design where he studied interior decorating. “I always wanted to be a painter, but I thought it was too impractical,” he says. Before starting his own design business, he worked for department stores and a family-owned furniture store in Syracuse. “Back in the 1960s-70s, ‘cubo furniture’ was popular. I used to mix leather-covered modular units with interesting Chinese and Chippendale furniture on Persian rugs. I always had an independent personal sense of style.”

In his long international career as an interior designer, he developed a keen sense of how color affects spatial experience. His design business, Habitat Interiors, trained his eye and gave him an opportunity to compose with the objects in a room. “I love to handle color and texture, working with scale and contrast. The interior is like a painting where placement is a dialogue with objects in space.”

Since his clients were sometimes major art collectors, Elias hung work by Pablo Picasso, Larry Rivers and Helen Frankenthaler among others, as part of his design work. Elias also owned art galleries in West Palm Beach and Palm Beach in Florida where he resides, except when he is living in his home in northwestern Connecticut with his partner, noted antique dealer David Veselsky. HIs galleries emphasized emerging artists.

More recently, he paints in his studio every day, often working on specific themes for a time, investigating form and color in largely abstract work.