As an artist, Elena Nikolaevna Kholodilina (1932–2018) was greatly influenced by the father of her husband Nikolay — the painter Arkady Alexandrovich Plastov. The son of Elena Nikolaevna and Nikolay Arkadievich — Nikolay Nikolaevich Plastov — later co-chaired the jury of the Plastov International Prize.

The first recipients of this award in the “Master” category were prominent representatives of the Russian painting school — Efrem Ivanovich Zverkov and Vladimir Nikitovich Telin, after whom the Zavolzhsk Art Gallery is named.

Elena Nikolaevna Kholodilina graduated from the Surikov Moscow Art Institute, the painting workshop of Professor Dmitry Konstantinovich Mochalsky. She entered the Soviet artistic scene during the Khrushchev Thaw and joined the creative searches and discoveries of the “1960s” artists who rejected all the temptations of official art of the 1940s and 1950s.

A candidate of Art History, Luisa Petrovna Bayura wrote, 

At the same time, Elena Kholodilina retained her own vision of the world. She worked mainly in the landscape genre. In addition to the village of Prislonikha and its surroundings, favorite areas of the Plastov family, she painted historically significant places. In her landscapes, the artist did not seek to fix fleeting changes in the state of the weather or lighting, but rather indirectly, with images of nature, she spoke about the Russian character and the Russian soul.

Elena Nikolaevna Kholodilina is known for her epic and at the same time poetic paintings of Russian nature. She preferred small-scale intimate landscapes with an increased presence of decorative elements and a “mosaic” brushstroke. All this can be seen in the work “Landscape with Winter Grains”.