By default your fresh theme installation will be the blog layout. Once you begin to follow our set up guide and add the Home widgets your homepage will begin to look as you see in our demo. If you want to have the blog layout simply leave all Home widget areas empty of widgets.
To configure a blog page that you can link to from your menu, navigate to Pages > Add New
You will leave this page blank and select the Blog Page Template from the drop down menu at the right.
It may be important for you to set a featured image for this page if you plan to link to it from a Genesis Featured Page widget.
One other thing you may like to consider:
For the Elegance theme it is suggested to set the theme default layout to full width. You may like to change this for the blog page. In our demo, we have selected the content/sidebar layout for the blog page. If you do not see this option on the editor screen you can turn it on by navigating to the screen options located at the top right of the editor screen:
Check the box beside Layout Settings
Now you can indicate the layout for this specific page:
Hit Publish!
Now you can link to it from a menu or Genesis Featured Page widget.